Organisation internationale de normalisation

7.7Option-1 Licensable Codecs

For several meetings, MPEG had discussions on Option-1 licensable codecs. Especially small companies consider the per-stream licensing fees as cumbersome.
At its 91^st meeting, MPEG issued document N11221 Possible future actions on standardization with Type 1 licensing where the legal issues are summarized and discussed. Type 1 licensing refers to option 1 of the joint patent declaration form, where an intellectual property holder can indicate that he will not charge for his IP. Laymen refer to this type of licensing as royalty-free.
In order to finalize the discussion MPEG issued a resolution at the 92^nd meeting related to royalty-free video codecs. Until this 93^rd meeting, the CH, CN, IT, KR, and UK NB indicated support. Given that the minimum resources for a new work item is available, MPEG decided to further explore this type of standard.
In response to N11533 Call for Evidence on Option-1 Video Coding Technology, MPEG received 2 inputs from Oracle (US NB), Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Zhejiang University (CN NB) at the 94^th meeting. Compared to MPEG-1, a noticeable improvement in subjective quality and an objective improvement of 1db to 4 db was observed. Comparisons against other standards like VP8 were not available. Given that the proponents envision further improvements of their codecs, a second call for evidence N11676 Call for Evidence on Option-1 Video Coding Technology was made. During this meeting one organization provided further evidence. The sequences were evaluated in an informal subjective test. Again, MPEG-1 is substantially outperformed. Input to the meeting suggests that the target for Option-1 video coding should be a 50% rate reduction compared to MPEG-1/2 for progressive material. No progress was made with respect to the working guidelines for developing an Option-1 licensable codec.
MPEG decided to go forward with option-1 video coding standardization. This intention is reflected in the press release of this meeting. Furthermore, N11833 Draft Call for Proposals (CfP) for Type-1 Video Coding and N11834 Type-1 Video Coding Requirements were drafted. It is foreseen to issue a Call at the 96^th meeting and evaluate the responses at the 98^th meeting. The standard should be finalized in 2013. In order to issue a call, substantial work regarding test conditions, evaluation, test sequences, anchors and standardization process including verification of type-1 status has to be performed. This work is carried out by the adhoc group N11842 AHG on Type-1 Video Coding.