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midnightbobarun
Very nice, I hope this means increased support for it in open source projects
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!

dylan604
> So let's encode video and torrent like it's 2002!

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

ColdStream
Time do get out the old CD of The.Matrix.1999-DVDrip(aXXo).Xvid.
rcarmo
Good. I have been poking at rcarmo/go-264 but was hesitant to tackle encoding :)
p1mrx
Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.
userbinator
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.)

rurban
But they sold xvid decoders already for the last 20 years. Every Chinese dvd players could play xvid already. Just not >1 b-frames
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

ronsor
> 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.

userbinator
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.
jbk
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.

pdntspa
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

account42
At least there are diminishing returns so H.264 will stay "good enough" for much longer.
anthk
Too late; software patents in Europe were void so most people grabbed XVID/DIVX encoders from Debian Multimedia. PKF and the like.

And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them. And mencoder for sure ;)

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?
hulitu
That's why they push for other codecs.