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by userbinator 969 days ago
That's the very last patent, and I haven't looked at it in any detail to see whether it might even be relevant to a typical software implementation; a lot of patents are on special optimisations / hardware implementations, so may not be relevant to your use-case.

It's also noteworthy that of the full list of H.264 patents here:

https://scratchpad.fandom.com/wiki/MPEG_patent_lists

...the majority of them have already expired. IANAL but since the original H.264 spec became public 20 years ago, everything in it should be usable as prior art.

Also, all existing MPEG-4 part 2 (infamous DivX etc.) patents and anything older, e.g. H.263, MPEG-1/2 and H.261, have certainly expired by now.