business use

[dimitrius]

I don't normaly think about copyright etc. for software I personally use but my company is thinking of making a website where users would be able to download video clips (motor-insurance sector) and among the options for formats I suggested XVID. Will we need any special business licences etc? and will our clients need anything like that for playback (which would also be for business purposes)?

[Neo Neko]

Yes there are special business considderations. Ones that are not covered by current distribution. Making Xvid unfortunatly not well suited to business use at this point. For one there is an encoder/decoder license which is not covered with Xvid. Xvid being a source only educational distribution. All Xvid binaries are unofficial and unlicensed. Ideally you business would have to negotiate individual licensing terms for Xvid with the MPEGLA. Further for commercial streaming purposes you also will need licensing fees for any form of MPEG4 streams. Which is not covered under Xvid either.

If you have flexible morals then you could commercially license Divx and then use Xvid instead. I mean you would have paid your dues. But then at that point why not use Divx as you would have lost some of the percieved value advantage of Xvid.

If your morals are especially pliable and this will only be used for internal or trusetd associate use and not commercial distribution technically you could just forgo the whole licensing issue all together. If your company does not stand to proft from the use of MPEG4 in any way and it will only be used for internal non equitable purposes you would not be much of a litigation target. But this solution would be a bit of a gamble.

MPEG4 licensing could be expensive depending on your needs. An avenue of thought you may not have explored would be to contact the xiphophorus group. xiph (http://xiph.org) For possibly less money than licensing an MPEG4 solution from Divx, 3ivx, etc including stream fees they might be willing and able to custom create a pattent free and license free system for your business. Their coding efficiency is not as good as that of some MPEG4 solutions. But nothing to sneeze at. While this may still be a large one time expendature for your company you will not incur any long term licensing debts. Something to think about. If nothing else they may be able to put you in touch with someone who has already created the solution you seek. ;)

[dimitrius]

Thank you for your reply.

Wow, this is more complicated than I thought it would be

[hellgauss]

Maybe in UK Xvid is freely usable for businnes. I remember that in UE algorythms (such as MPEG4) cannot be copyrighted.

[Neo Neko]

I would not be so sure. Many in the MPEG consortium are located or have presence in the EU. Further having trade agreements with the US means that most EU nations even though they may not recognise such pattents themselves are still answerable for them in some manner.

I have been playing around on the theora front. Theora could very well be usefull. Video quality is good. Audio quality is great. There is no all in one package. So you are going to have to use something like Virtualdub or Adobe Premiere to edit. But once it is edited you can feed it directly into ffmpeg2theora (http://www.v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/index.html) which with a command line switch or two will output the video in OGG Theora video with OGG Vorbis audio in an OGG file. There are directshow filters IIRC to play in Windows Media Player. Or perhaps you could bundle the Video Lan Client on a CD etc and even set it to auto play under Windows. With theora and vorbis your company will incurr zero royalty or licensing debts. It is all free software and free standards. The only technicallity would be Videolan. It uses FFMPEG which provides decoders for many licensed formats including MPEG 1, 2, and 4 etc. However no licensing has been negotiated with the MPEGLA. But seeing as The video lan crew provide official supported binaries for many OS your liability for licensing would be next to none. Since it would be up to them to set up licensing for their binaries. Not you.

As long as we are talking PC playback you should really give Theora a look. There is no set top support ATM. But it will come in the future. Personally I will continue to use MPEG4 and Xvid. But Publicly I think I will use theora. All it is missing are some good tools and integration under more oft used platforms. But not enough to keep me from using it. ;)