Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet?

cm0002@lemmy.world · 7 days ago

kralk@lemm.ee · 7 days ago

I have literally no understanding of video codecs, standards etc. Is there a “set and forget” option which is free and good?

GHiLA@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 7 days ago

H264 is almost universally playable and transcodable by nearly everything on earth.

kralk@lemm.ee · 7 days ago

But non-free?

GHiLA@sh.itjust.works · edit-2 7 days ago

Never cared. I’m one of those people that would indeed download a car.

darthsid@lemmy.world · 7 days ago

How would the patents expiring help the common man?

patatahooligan@lemmy.world · 7 days ago

Because patents cause issues for free software. Some examples:

As far as I can tell, vlc is legal only because French law does not recognize software patents, see here.
HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU is impossible, see here.
I think Media Foundation is unsupported in Proton because of patents as well, though I’m having trouble finding a reliable source on that.

hendrik@palaver.p3x.de · edit-2 7 days ago

And free and open source software can be written, shared and used without potentially getting sued. And these projects power lots of things.