I was responding to the line "if 3 years from now MPEG LA decides to start charging content providers a licensing fee for their content, even if that content is distributed for free."
Which is paid for by the folks making the software tools unless the OS paid the fee for the codec in which case you're good. The camera manufacture either paid the fee or shoots a format that can be converted on the PC.
That says absolutely nothing about h.264 decoder or encoder implementations, such as the decoders needed in web browsers to handle h.264 in <video> tags; that just says MPEG-LA won't charge people distributing h.264 video files.
The parent post didn't mention decoders / encoders, it mentioned free content. These articles[1][2] explain the costs and possible increases[3]. Apple, Microsoft, and Google have bought the license for their libraries on their platforms.
Exactly. All they've said is "we promise we won't charge you for sending bits of h.264-encoded data across a wire". It's not clear that they legally could charge for that even if they wanted do!
And yet they've fooled vast numbers of people into thinking that h.264 is free-of-charge as a result. It's the most impressive piece of anti-FUD I've ever seen, sadly.
