Slightly related to the discussion here: yesterday I found out that the Rasberry Pi is about 10% cheaper because it doesn't include licences for proprietary codecs [1]. As consumer electronics are getting cheaper and open/free licenses are becoming more popular, hopefully we'll see more of this happening.
The RPi does come with licenses for some proprietary codecs, namely MPEG-4 Part 10 (H264) and MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, Xvid and the like), mostly because they're cheap and their use widespread. The extra license you can buy are for codecs that are either too expensive (MPEG-2) or not used very much so their inclusion would increase the price of the RPi for everyone while only being useful for a few.
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Slightly related to the discussion here: yesterday I found out that the Rasberry Pi is about 10% cheaper because it doesn't include licences for proprietary codecs [1]. As consumer electronics are getting cheaper and open/free licenses are becoming more popular, hopefully we'll see more of this happening.
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.com/license-keys/
The RPi does come with licenses for some proprietary codecs, namely MPEG-4 Part 10 (H264) and MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX, Xvid and the like), mostly because they're cheap and their use widespread. The extra license you can buy are for codecs that are either too expensive (MPEG-2) or not used very much so their inclusion would increase the price of the RPi for everyone while only being useful for a few.
It sucks though, because to watch H.264 on it you have to buy a license key for it to unlock the hardware on the device.
No, you don't. H264 can be decoded on the hardware out of the box. The licenses are only for MPEG-2 and VC1.
Ah, my bad.