MPEG LA is asking companies to prepare to attack the freely licensed WebM format and its underlying VP8 video codec from Google.

MPEG LA CEO says it is looking at plans for a patent pool to "essential patent rights" for Google's recently open sourced VP8 video codec

We've all heard how the h.264 is rolled over on patents and royalties. Even with these facts, I kept supporting the best-performing "delivery" codec in the market, which is h.264. "Let the best win", I kept thinking. But it wasn't until very recently when I was made aware that the problem is way deeper. No, my friends.

The MPEG Cartel and Microsoft Corporation both engage in abusive activities whereby patents are used anti-competitively and discriminatingly

Sullivan & Cromwell's Garrard Beeney wasn't at all surprised about the antitrust suit filed Friday against his client, the patent licensing company MPEG LA, by a German technology firm called Nero AG. Beeney told us that antitrust allegations are a pretty common tactic in the sort of licensing fee dispute MPEG LA and Nero are involved in.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

The importance of WebM, its progress in GNU/Linux-compatible Web browsers, and Google's situation wrt MPEG-LA FUD

Avidemux is a graphical tool to edit videos. It can open AVI, openDML, MPEG, Nuppelvideo, and BMPs. Most common codecs are supported (M-JPEG, MPEG, DivX, Xvid, huffyuv, WMA, etc.) thanks to libavcodec and libmpeg2. Video can be edited, cut, appended, filtered (resize/crop/denoise), and re-encoded to either AVI (MPEG4/MJPEG) or MPEG 1/2.

When Walt Mossberg talks, people listen. He's the big tech writer at the Wall Street Journal, and ... having the WSJ report on Linux and Ubuntu is huge.