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

> 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!

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

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...

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

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

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

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?

When MPEG-5?

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And, yes, I remember w32codecs until MPlayer's bundled set superseded them.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