Thanks, I did search the manual for the obvious keywords and came up with nothing.

I don't think we should hold SCS accountable for this. A royalty free licence may cost very serious money and/or might simply not be available. It's possible the replication house may be able to arrange to pay the fees. If you do your own duplication things could get harder.

Bob.

"AC3 seems a little more flaky... it says you can only distribute from licenses encoders, but I always assumed it WAS a licenses encoder. Nothing said otherwise (like the others)."

Well, heres the thing, it IS a licensed encoder, but to advertise the use of the technology, or to use trademarks, in addition to the standards put forward by Dolby Labs Inc one (the engineer or the studio) must be licensed wiht a TSA as well.

So not only must one use a licensed encoder (such as the encoder within Vegas <NOT apps such as BeSweet ) but to distribute said material with proper use of trademarks, one must be licensed with Dolby Labs Inc.

As for the other codecs, Bob i honestly dont know mate. I was of the understanding that to buy the software and the encoder itself, one is also given the right to publish said material in said format.
I would assume owever that the "permission" requirements or probably based on QA as opposed to anything else

I honestly dont know

Dolby generally lets you use their encoders royalty free, they make their money on the decoders. The licence that comes with Vegas is OK but you cannot use the encoded stream for broadcast as it's not the professional encoder nor can you use the Dolby logos. That's why there's other Dolby encoders that cost as much as Vegas.

However I've finally found all the licence details in the manual on page 3. The Sony AVC codec is ONLY licenced for encoding or decoding for personal or non commercial use. So if you have a camera that uses that codec and you used it to shoot footage professionally you cannot use the codec supplied with Vegas. Well I'm not a lawyer but it seems pretty damn specific. I'd paste a copy here but of course the manual is copy protected.

The MPEG 2 thing reads like a real can of worms. Not a MC thing at all. Under MPEGLA and MPEG 2:
"Use of this product that in any manner that complies to the mpeg-2 standard is expressly prohibited....".
Err, what the....??

Bob.

Farss, I think we had this conversion back around vegas5, where we noticed that MP3 was not usable in a commercial product. Mpeg2 is limited based on volume; then after a limited volume, one has to paid a fee on volume levels or bulk rates, if I remember correctly. If you use a production house, its in their fees if I remember correctly.

let's not forget: Sonic Foundry apparently had no limits on what you could use the codec's for. All it had were copyright notices.

Wouldn't surprise me that Sony has licenses for these codec's in other products (that cost a lot more) and didn't want give their high-end users the "shaft" by giving is non"high-end" users the same codec's for cheap.
I tried looking for a way to get an mpeg-2 license for my DVD's. Looks like I can't. Perhaps the EULA is referring to the company that sold us the codec (IE Sony can't charge us a royalty on our mpeg-2 encodes?) vs the end user? The mpeg-la site doesn't look like it's user-friendly, just copyright/patent info.

Indeed we had that conversation.
The mp3 codec is usable for commercial use, you just have to pay a fee. Thankfully my client got to pay that, after all I have no idea how many copies of the titles they released.

For the whole story on most licencing mpegla.com is the place to go. mpeg-4 and AVC aka H.264 is fairly complex.


Bob.

Wierd.. ive neer had an issue wth the encoded masers i create. I always assumed the produciton house took care of this.
Then again, when encoding commercial stuff, i use CCE with at least 4 pass as the source was DV25 (4pass is something vegas cannot do and it makes a whopping difference to highly compressed acquired material... )
In any case, im currently consideing using CCE HD for AVCHD renders for my HD deliveries, simply because i dont have time to dick around with any more licenses than i already am..
I dotn want to create somethign in Vegas, then to find a licensing bill in my letter box telling me that owe XYZ dollars in royalties simply due to the encoder i use..

I think you're not understanding the issue here. It doesn't matter whose encoder you use, the one you get for free or the one you pay a zillion dollars for. You still have to pay the fee on commercial distributions that are produced using the patented technology.
Check the mpegla website and you'll get a grasp of the problem. There's a huge list of patent holders for each codec. mpegla tries to get them all to the table to sign off on a deal where one fee is paid to mpegla and they divide the spoils amongst them.

edit:

I think the fee for having an mpeg-2 encoder in an application is around $2 for copy. Per DVD it's like $0.02.

Bob.

Would I be right in thinking that that is not an issue if you are pitching in to a distributor? We are going to be authoring the disc, but I'm guessing that the licensing of codecs will be handled between the distributor and the production house.

We are going to be using Mpeg 2, AC3 and DTS in our DVD. If we go with BLu-ray or HD-DVD I can't begin to imagine how many codecs that will use!

Thanks,

Rob,

As I understand it, yes that's correct.

Bob.