Re: Royalty and license issues

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"Roman Kudinov" <krandv on rbcmail zone ru> wrote in message
news:uoQMPUodFHA.3048@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Basically, no.
>
> EULA for DirectShow and WMF SDK directly states that you don't need to pay
> royalties. I don't know about DirectShow but for WMF SDK you should
> specify
> the following in the About dialog or any other place which can be easily
> reviewed by a user:
>
> "Portions utilize Microsoft Windows Media Technologies. Copyright (c)
> 1999-2002 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved"
>
> For both SDK's there's a directory Redist in the install folder which
> content can be redistributed within your application.
>
> But please refer to WMF/DirectX SDK eula (you can find it in the install
> folder) to get more details and all rights and obligations

This is not exactly correct, although quite close. You don't have to pay
royalties so long as you're using the WMF in a Windows environment. If your
product was going to support Mac OSX or Linux and you were porting the
codecs to that platform, or some other proprietary hardware, you must pay
royalties for each and every instance. There are separate fees for encoding
and decoding instances as well. See here for more information:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/licensing/licensing.aspx#royalties_3

Directshow only runs on windows (so far as I know) and there are no
licencing fees.

For MPEG, DivX, or Xvid, you're technically supposed to pay royalties to the
MPEG group regardless of where the codec is being used (i.e.: there's no
difference between using MPEG on a Mac verses a windows box from a royalties
standpoint). I don't know who you pay for H.26x codecs.


.

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