The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

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!

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.

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

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 And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them.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?

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...

aboardRat4

When MPEG-5?