The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Last-MPEG-4-Patent-Expired

by LorenDB • 3 days ago

225 76 3 days ago

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

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!

CharlesW2• 3 days ago

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).

p1mrx2• 3 days ago

The openness of those codecs depend on the last patent expiring, not the first.

dylan604• 3 days ago

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

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

xattt• 3 days ago

I’m not sure how to get there. Do you have Microsoft Streets and Trips directions I can print off?

ColdStream3• 3 days ago

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

anal_reactor• 3 days ago

I specifically remember that my dad brought from work crappy projector and I watched Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix that was RMVB encoded camera rip from cinema. RMVB was all the rage on my 128kbps internet.

rcarmo• 3 days ago

Good. I have been poking at rcarmo/go-264 but was hesitant to tackle encoding :)

p1mrx2• 3 days ago

Note that MPEG-4 part 2 is H.263/DivX/XviD, not H.264.

jchw5• 3 days ago

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.

Dylan168073• 3 days ago

computationally cheap to encode and decode

Well I'm not sure about decode, but as of a few years ago weren't h.265 and AV1 able to do much better compression than h.264 at almost all levels of compute? https://people.videolan.org/~unlord/SVT-AV1_BD-rate.png And h.266 encoders can probably go faster now too.

userbinator5• 3 days ago

just that I think the h264 long tail will be one of the longest long tails of a video codec.

I think MPEG-1 and 2 (from which MP3 comes) might be even longer.

userbinator5• 3 days ago

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.)

anthk2• 3 days ago

H.263 was used as the former codec of Netmeeting (and maybe some other VoIP software too).

rurban• 3 days ago

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• 3 days ago

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

ronsor3• 3 days ago

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.

goalieca2• 3 days ago

Now if only copyright didn't last forever..

Teever2• 3 days ago

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

The purpose of the system as it was originally conceived was not to provide maximum economic extraction -- the purpose was to promote the progress of science and useful arts.

It is not necessarily the case that the maximization of economic extraction coincides with the progress of science and useful arts.

matheusmoreira4• 3 days ago

Intellectual property is total bullshit as a concept but I suppose patents are at least tolerable since they only last 10 to 20 years, unlike copyright which lasts for our lifetimes plus a million billion years.

userbinator5• 3 days ago

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.

makeitdouble• 3 days ago

I read "resolution" as pixel count more than DPI.

As it becomes cheaper to capture and process higher res content, we're bound to push it to bigger displays (VR included). I guess the human eye will be the limit when we're at retina levels of DPI on a sphere.

joshspankit2• 3 days ago

You may be underestimating the desire to earn through differentiation.

Assuming the product companies accept the plateau on resolution (I agree it’s likely), there are many ways to exploit the other stuff. Colour space, tacling each type of compression artifact, additional channels (probly not long until we have HDR RGBW), etc etc and those will each come with their committees made of patent-hungry companies seeing non-encumbered encodings as “undesirable”

dabinat• 3 days ago

For distribution perhaps, but for acquisition it makes sense to have the highest resolution possible.

ColdStream3• 3 days ago

Pretty much. 1080p it very good, 4K is near perfect to me. By the time you can see the pixels you are WAY too close to the screen.

jbk• 3 days ago

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.

kasabali• 3 days ago

Main profile is very mediocre. Any file I see in the wild is encoded in high profile.

pdntspa• 3 days ago

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

ColdStream3• 3 days ago

Very likely, look at JPEG. It was released in 1992 and it is still wildly popular on line.

account424• 2 days ago

At least there are diminishing returns so H.264 will stay "good enough" for much longer.

anthk2• 3 days ago

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• 3 days ago

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?

wmf• 3 days ago

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

userbinator5• 3 days ago

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.

1317• 3 days ago

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...

aboardRat4• 3 days ago

When MPEG-5?

LtdJorge• 3 days ago

Never, I hope

ksec3• 3 days ago

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.

hulitu• 1 day ago

That's why they push for other codecs.

The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

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