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karen said:

native h.264 codec in the browser (sometimes referred to as html5)

I've never heard it called "native h.264".  That's simply a codec that can be used with HTML5-however, since it may (will) someday have licensing fees, it's gonna be the world's next GIF.

PCbasics said:

Locutus said:

since it may (will) someday have licensing fees, it's gonna be the world's next GIF.

---

 

huh?

Oh boy. GIFs… licensing fees… the mid-90s…. GAH!
Wikipedia said:

In 1977 and 1978, Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel published a pair of papers on a new class of
lossless data-compression algorithms, now collectively referred to as LZ77
and LZ78. In 1983, Terry
Welch developed a fast variant of LZ78 which was named Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW).^[11][12]

Welch filed a patent application for the LZW method in June 1983. The
resulting patent, US patent 4558302 , granted in December 1985, was
assigned to Sperry Corporation who subsequently
merged with Burroughs Corporation in 1986 and
formed Unisys.^[11]
Further patents were obtained in the United Kingdom, France, Germany,
Italy, Japan and Canada.

In June 1984, an article by Welch was published in the IEEE magazine which publicly described the LZW
technique for the first time.^[13]
LZW became a popular data compression technique and, when the patent
was granted, Unisys entered into licensing agreements with over a
hundred companies.^[11][14]

The popularity of LZW led CompuServe
to choose it as the compression technique for their GIF format,
developed in 1987. At the time, CompuServe was not aware of the patent.^[11]
Unisys became aware that the GIF format used the LZW compression
technique and entered into licensing negotiations with CompuServe in
January 1993. The subsequent agreement was announced on December 24,
1994.^[12]
Unisys stated that they expected all major commercial on-line
information services companies employing the LZW patent to license the
technology from Unisys at a reasonable rate, but that they would not
require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit
GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services.^[14]

Following this announcement, there was widespread condemnation of
CompuServe and Unisys, and many software developers threatened to stop
using the GIF format. The PNG format (see below) was
developed in 1995 as an intended replacement.^[11][12][13]
However, obtaining support from the makers of Web browsers and other
software for the PNG format proved difficult and it was not possible to
replace the GIF format, although PNG has gradually increased in
popularity.^[11]
The libungif library allowed GIF's to be decoded but not encoded
without use of the Unisys LZW patent.^[15]

In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing
practice, announcing the option for owners of Billboard and Intra net
Web sites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of
$5000 or $7500.^[16]
Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users
who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. Nevertheless, Unisys
was the subject of thousands of online attacks and abusive emails from
users believing that they were going to be charged $5000 or sued for
using GIFs on their websites.^[17]
Despite giving free licenses to hundreds of non-profit organizations,
schools and governments, Unisys was completely unable to generate any
good publicity and continued to be vilified by individuals and
organizations such as the League for Programming Freedom
who started the "Burn All GIFs" campaign.^[18]

The US LZW patent expired on June 20, 2003.^[19]
The counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and
Italy expired on June 18, 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired
on June 20, 2004 and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on July 7,
2004.^[19]
Consequently, while Unisys has further patents and patent applications
relating to improvements to the LZW technique,^[19]
the GIF format may now be used freely.

yourpalal said:

huh?

COMPANY A: "Ooh we now have an industry-leading compression standard!"

COMPANY B: "Let's use it in our new image format, GIF!"

COMPANY A: "Oh no you didn't! We have patents!"

COMPANY B: "Ok let's license them!"

COMPANY A: "Sure!"

a while later

COMPANY A: "Oh BTW everyone needs to pay us to use B's image format. Except for (list of people who don't, such as non-profits, etc)"

EVERYONE: "BOOO! DOWN WITH GIF!"

COMPANY A: "What's the matter, we just want money! And we don't even want it from (list of people, such as non-profits, etc)"

EVERYONE: "WE'LL JUST NOT NOTICE THAT!"

yourpalal said:

OK Now……it's clear……..

……..as mud!

Here ya go.