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> At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility

Just as the patent system intended: maximum extraction was enabled while the product was useful.

Read the list of patents left: a lot of them are on SVC (no one uses this) and on higher profile.

For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.

I don't think video resolution will increase all that much in the future, except for niche uses, as the resolution of the human eye becomes a limiting factor.

Hey now, MP3 is still relevant even though better codecs have come (and gone)

Something tells me H264 is going to be sticking around for a while just on sheer compatibility and compute requirements

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).

Time do get out the old CD of The.Matrix.1999-DVDrip(aXXo).Xvid.

> So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

Let's have a meet up a Circuit City!!

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.

DivX/XviD yes, but not H.263. Patents for H.263 expired long ago. This is MPEG-4 ASP, which is a superset of H.263.

(Source: have written a H.263 decoder as a learning exercise.)

The patent pool system is really bad. There's no incentive to weed out bad patents.

Those patents may not necessarily be required to encode or decode, if they're just a new way to implement some part of the specification.

There is. MPEG-5 EVC Basic Profile that is Patent unencumbered, with only dozens patents that is soon to be expired, and EVC High Profile that competes with VVC in terms of quality.

There is also LCEVC ( Not connected with EVC ) that is a scaling layer on top of existing video codec. You can apply LCEVC on top of EVC, VVC, HEVC or AVC as well as AV1 and AV2. LCEVC has been selected by Brail as part of their TV 3.0 technology stack on top VVC.

While there are momentum on LCEVC, I actually wished EVC gained more momentum. I guess everything is too late now.

Never, I hope