The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Finally Expired
The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired
Today marks a historic milestone as the final MPEG-4 Part 2 patent, which remained active in Brazil, has officially expired. While US and EU patents lapsed years ago, this last barrier confirmed by the VIA Licensing Alliance means the widely used video format is now entirely free from patent restrictions. This development is a significant win for open-source software and multimedia developers worldwide.
Great to see this day finally realized given the prevalence of MPEG-4.
- at1as
Moving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
- 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!
- p1mrx
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
- 1317
as everyone is saying, this is Xvid, NOT h264. pretty poor reporting by phoronix here
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
- nikanj
It's so weird to look at the patents list for H.264 and see multiple patents granted after the H.264 specification was released. Was the situation similar for MPEG-4?