H.264 format gets new free license - takes aim at Google and WebM

The growing one-upmanship and debate online around video in HTML 5 has taken a new twist today. MPEG LA, the company behind the patents for the MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 video codecs as well as H.264, has announced that it will offer a royalty-free license of the H.264 codec to sites that offer the video free to web users.