Blizzard: HTML5 video and H.264 - what history tells us and why we're standing with the web

Like stated above there are 22 different companies involved in the Mpeg
group. And if the GSM folks are any indication of how these sort of industry
'IP' groups operate they do everything they can to shovel as many patents
into the pool as possible.

So it's likely that there are dozens and dozens of patents covering all
sorts of different aspects of the codecs, and software and hardware related
to the codecs. So even if the video card folks build codecs-as-hardware they
still only likely take a some patents out of the equation and not all of
them. Meaning that even with hardware acceleration your still not going to
escape from the licensing requirements.