As of late, concern has risen about the H.264 codec.  If you read the fine print on any video camera encodes natively to the format, it states that the footage may not be used for commercial purposes.  The consortium that owns patents that make H.264, which includes heavy-weights such us Apple, Microsoft and Toshiba amongst about 30 others.

The Biz Media crew would much rather see an “open” standard, allowing anyone to use a codec without royalties.  Google recently bought the VP8 Codec from ON2, this could be the open codec required to get around licensing fees.

This small article is certainly not doing justice to this issue. A Recent Engadget posting – Know Your Rights: H.264 and You does an absolutely fantastic job in explaining the issue in plan English.  The Engadget article was in response to a very strongly worded piece called Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA.

“The video above demonstrates the comparative visual difference between VP8  and H.264 at the same datarate. The source videos were 1080p and encoded to H.264 (using build r915 of the x264 encoder, set to HQ 2 pass) and VP8 at a bitrate of 2mbps.”