Is Dolby proprietary?

euser1984

If it is I assume a license fee is required for each use....what's wrong with newer technologies such as 320 MP3 for example or .ogg...

MP3 is actually proprietary too...

catfax

Yes it is and a license is required for commercial use, Dolby in the past were lax about this but in recent years have become much aggressive in IP licensing.

Audio/video codecs in general are heavily IP encumbered, so even if you claim to have developed a clean codec that doesn't infringe on the intellectual property of another your still going to get sued at some point as someone will crawl out of the wood work saying your codec works too much like mine.

Also even though a codec can be open like Flac for instance that does not mean it is "free", Flac the IP is owned but Flac is given away with a royalty free license.

ogg is not new and not popular, mp3 has heavy license fees. Anything to do with codecs is a total minefield.

euser1984

Yeah but ogg is newer than mp3 and it's also newer than Dolby... ogg just doesn't have the commercial backing I'd say aswell as having a horrible name.

How much are the license fees for mp3? I didn't think they were that expensive. I just thought it was a very tiny percentage per file used.

You also have .mkv containers - they are license free.

euser1984

.mkv is available on open source licenses including LGPL and BSD.

euser1984

I know where your going with the legal issues but have you any examples?

catfax

mkv is just a container not a codec per say, it can take a huge range of codecs.

Royalty rates for mp3 are listed on website just google mp3 licensing.

Recent legal examples (Google is your friend codec + lawsuit or intellectual property)
- Dolby threatening to sue many iOS, Google app store developers and forcing them to remove their apps that had Dolby decoding support (same goes for DTS). Those that licensed Dolby put their apps back up eventually those that didn't removed Dolby decoding and put them back up.

I've also heard Dolby demands that you pre-pay essentially for a couple of thousand units (your app) to weed out anyone who doesn't have the money to make it worth their while.

Most video codec licensing is done via MPEG LA (licensing authority) which is a patent pool of various companies that own the IP on codecs.

The most common video codec in use is H.264 (MPEG4 AVC), this is given away with a royalty free license for streaming internet media.

The successor to H.264 is H.265 (MPEG 4 HEVC) and was due to replace it, however a group of companies have broken away from MPEG LA formed their own called HEVC Advance and are now demanding very expensive fees to the point that it has spooked many and HEVC adoption is now in question.

Even Google's own codecs VP8/9/10 have not managed to gain too much traction due to fears from lawsuits by MPEG LA that they infringe on their IP.


If your making a commercial product that has Dolby decoding support you must license it, or they will come after you.

Your only dodge out of this is to ship the hardware with no software and have the user download a OS to install on the device themselves that contains the media player built using open source software.