I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

I’d be willing to pay but I can’t

I enquired about it a while ago; you have two choices from the patent pools:

1. Buy a licence that covers a specific binary only. Something like the Fluendo GStreamer codec pack, for example. This gets you binaries that are "legal", but where you can't compile your own.
2. Pay $huge to cover all open source users. This is a non-starter for even the biggest of companies - the H.264 patent pool was talking about a figure in the billions of dollars per year, for example.

And note that the per-user royalties are not necessarily small; the patent pools want to go back to the "glory days" where they got to charge a small amount per decoder (about $1), plus a per-minute fee for use of encoders that varied depending on the audience, plus a fee per encoder.