H.264 irrelevant yet?
H.264 irrelevant yet?
Posted Jun 3, 2025 4:53 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: H.264 irrelevant yet? by pabs
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora
With H.264 the licensing is managed by one patent pool and the costs are quite reasonable for any commercial product.
With H.265 there are multiple patent pools, and getting a license from all of them is unreasonably expensive for small players. This caused some vendors to remove the H265 support, even though they can easily pay reasonable cost (e.g. Synology NAS).
AV1 is supposed to be patent-free, but there are leeches trying to attach themselves to it. So far, all the patents are being challenged and slowly invalidated: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights?tag=AV1 Unfortunately, Apple is still dragging its feet and doesn't have hardware encoding support for it.