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

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.

MPEG LA is blatantly trying to claim a monopoly on online video. The patent system is failing for software, and initiatives to “fix” the system are not working. A clear exclusion of software ideas from patentability is the only workable solution. VP8 is an attempt to free the software industry and all software developers from this patent troll.

Harsh words for MPEG-LA and also for Novell's Banshee, which is a Mono patents Trojan that inflects Moovida (while masquerading as "a standard")

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

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.

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.

Microsoft is trying to sneak patents-encumbered MPEG formats into the Web using Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9); Microsoft threatens (again) to go after Linux legally