[GeneticGenesis]

I know it's not public domain per-say, but for me, the thing that's most exciting is that in 2025, the last remaining patents on the h.264 (AVC) video codec will expire [1].

Now if only HEVC wasn't such a hot patent / licensing mess.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

[iterance]

Just thought you might want to know - it's "per se" not "per say"/variations thereof.

[asveikau]

Per se is latin for "for itself".

[TeMPOraL]

> Now if only HEVC wasn't such a hot patent / licensing mess.

Somehow I suspect HEVC suddenly became a thing in the past few years precisely because AVC patents are expiring.

[kmeisthax]

Yes, and in fact this is explicitly the business model[0] of ISO MPEG and ITU VCEG. They pay for their basic research by letting participants patent and license the resulting standards-essential inventions[1].

HEVC/H.265 has been in development since 2004, i.e. right after AVC/H.264 was published, and took almost a decade to actually be standardized. There's even an H.266, which started in 2017, a few years after H.265 was released. Though the primary concern of patent holders is not AVC patents expiring. Those patents actually aren't that valuable, because AVC is licensed way too cheap. MPEG-LA had negotiated a very generous free rate for online video[2], in response to MPEG-4 ASP (aka "DivX :-)") basically not getting much use online.

What patent owners want is to go back to the days of MPEG-2 where they were making money hand over fist just for owning a functional codec. They even sacked Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder and head of ISO MPEG, because he was trying to change ISO's patent policy to be more favorable to developing royalty-free codecs.

[0] ISO does not license patents and has no affiliation with MPEG-LA/Access Advance/etc, but Leonardo has gone on record saying this is their 'business model': https://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solu...

[1] under FRAND licensing

[2] Which is why YouTube's allowed to use H.264 without paying $$$ for it. Before that, they used whatever codec was available in Flash Player. Adobe (and Macromedia before it) used On2 VP6 primarily because it had no patent licensing royalty; before that they'd used H.263.

[harshreality]

Encoding efficiency for a given perceptual quality is very important when you pay for bandwidth or disk space.

Otherwise there would have been no effort to create vp9 and av1, as everyone on that side of the codec wars would've stuck with vp8.

[philistine]

That's incredible. With MP3 already completely patent-free as well, we have an extraordinary free set of audio and video codecs for the next couple of decade, at least until HEVC becomes free.

[yaomtc]

Let's not forget Opus. Not technically patent-free but it practically is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#Patent_cla...

Also Vorbis has always been patent free.

[walrus01]

One of the primary reasons why AV1 exists is because HEVC is such a hot mess.

[TiredOfLife]

There are already two patent pools for av1 that want rent.

[bobmcnamara]

A tale as old as video codecs.

[a1o]

In the link it seems the last patent in US go as long as 2027?

If the patents really expire in 2025, is there an already open source library written either in C or C++ one could use for reading h.264?

[mtlynch]

Cisco published their implementation under BSD license:

https://github.com/cisco/openh264/

[gavinsyancey]

x264 has been around forever, and it's FOSS.

[account42]

Dude, FFMPEG has open source decoders for pretty much every codec ever created.

As the sibling points out, for H.264 we even had a high-quality open source encoder for a long time.