[FFmpeg-devel] Patent issues with FFV1

Paul B Mahol onemda at gmail.com
Mon Jun 10 23:13:08 CEST 2013


On 6/10/13, Dave Rice <dave at dericed.com> wrote:
> Hi ffmpeg-devel,
>
> A colleague of mine was recently sent me this email. I removed two names
> from it before sending it to the list serv.
>
> On Jun 10, 2013, at 4:06 PM, John Walko wrote:
>
>> Dave:
>>
>> What do you know about potential patent issues with FFV1?
>>
>> We have a client we are working with...and were discussing FFV1 and JPEG
>> 2000.  We want her to consider FFV1/Matroska.  She spoke to [ redacted
>> name ] and another person at the [ redacted government archive ], and they
>> raised the potential for FFV1 violating a patent...but our client had no
>> other details.  Of course, she is now scared away from FFV1.  I'd like to
>> research this a little more to find out what they are talking about and
>> see if it is something we should be concerned over.
>>
>> Thanks;
>>
>> John Walko
>> Media Archive Manager
>> www.scenesavers.com
>
> IIRC FFv1 hasn't undergone a thorough legal review but is also an
> FFmpeg-authored codec. Are there any potential patent issues with FFv1?

FFv1 use arithmetic coding. Considering that one can patent color I don't have
time nor motivation to search for patents that describe something
similar and are
still in use.

> Could such patent issues affect the future ability of an archive to decode
> (or encode) FFv1.

Only if such archive is country where such patent(s) do matter.


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