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The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

phoronix.com

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Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#3

Post by theandrewbailey »

> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil.

Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#4

Post by CharlesW »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil. Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#7

Post by p1mrx »

CharlesW wrote: post #4
theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

> While the US and EU patents around MPEG-4 Part 2 expired in recent years, until today there remained one patent still active in Brazil. Since MPEG-this Part that is hard to keep straight, this is the MPEG standard backing Xvid and DivX codecs. So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).

The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#8

Post by CharlesW »

p1mrx wrote: post #7
CharlesW wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Via Licensing listed this patent as standards-essential to several MPEG codecs (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266), and it's also listed for VC-1 (a SMPTE standard).

The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.

Of course.

Re: The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

#9

Post by jchw »

p1mrx wrote: post #6

Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.

Yeah. I think h264 is coming soon, too, though. Most of the remaining known h264 patents expire next year, with only one patent extending out further.

I do believe that more modern codecs like h265 and AV1 have a lot to offer us, but having h264 be fully unencumbered by patents will be nice. By modern standards it is very well-supported in both hardware and software, computationally cheap to encode and decode, and still does a good enough job for most use cases. h264 doesn't seem like it will be displaced any time soon to the degree that h264 once displaced its own predecessors, though obviously that's not to say that we don't see or won't see more adoption of newer video codecs across the internet in general, just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.

And thanks to the availability of codecs like AV1 which are effectively not patent encumbered (seems there is no practical reason to take the threats otherwise seriously) it seems the era of patent encumbered media formats is slowly coming to a close. Good riddance.

edit: Bit of a mess but here is some source for the h264 expiration.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

So it seems 2030-11-10 is the date where h264 (version 3) will become patent unencumbered world wide, a bit earlier for the U.S. The other profiles/newer versions like AVC/SVC will take a while longer.

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