Talk:Cinepak

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What is the current patent status of cinepak implementations? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.107.175.97 (talk • contribs)

Well, implementations such as FFmpeg or VLC or MPlayer are probably free. --Ysangkok (talk) 18:30, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

That's not exactly what the parent asked. Patents are a different beast to copyright; it may be legal to distribute open source code but it will be illegal under patent law to use a binary compiled from said code (unless of course if the patents have expired, or you are a licensor/owner of the patent).

Term of patent in the United States: it's very likely that, due to the age of Cinepak and the patent term of 17 years applicable to that time, Cinepak is now patent-free. C xong (talk) 03:36, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

The patent (5,287,420) was filed April 8, 1992, so the "20 years from application" rule means it won't expire until next year. I doubt that anyone paid the maintenance fees on it. Timrprobocom (talk) 23:37, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Update

The External Links section refers to Compression Technologies Inc at the URL www.cinepak.com, and mentions that it is in Japanese. The reason the page is in Japanese is that CTI has gone out of business, and the domain name has been snatched up by a squatter. That page has nothing to do with Cinepak. Should the link be removed? It would be nice to retain a mention of CTI.
Cinepak is now in the awkward position of being an orphan. Supermac was the original owner, then Supermac was bought by Radius. Before Radius imploded, they sold the rights to CTI. CTI went out of business circa 2001, so even if there were patent, license, or copyright issues, it is not clear that there is any entity in the world with standing to defend them. Timrprobocom (talk) 23:25, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Comparison of Cinepack and Ogg?

Quote form article: Cinepak files tend to be about 70% larger than similar quality MPEG-4 or Ogg files.

Ogg is container and it is impossible to compare it with Cinepack. Maybe someone was thinking about Theora which is often embedded in Ogg files?

83.26.111.19 (talk) 18:14, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Either way, the claim in the article is overly optimistic. Cinepak is nowhere near H.263 or Theora in terms of quality-per-bitrate. KetchupSalt (talk) 01:30, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

bits

The home page of Cinepak talks about 16-bit and 32-bit versions. It isn't clarified in this article. How about 64-bit versions? —DIV (137.111.13.4 (talk) 03:24, 16 March 2015 (UTC))

The 64-bit versions (more precisely, the x86-64 versions) of Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10 can run 32-bit and 64-bit executables, but not 16-bit executables, see WoW64 § Application compatibility. 32-bit versions of Windows can run 32-bit and 16-bit executables. The 16-bit / 32-bit Cinepak codecs offered on the homepage can only be used by 16-bit / 32-bit executables, respectively. Conquerist (talk) 05:05, 16 March 2015 (UTC)