[a1o]

In the link it seems the last patent in US go as long as 2027?

If the patents really expire in 2025, is there an already open source library written either in C or C++ one could use for reading h.264?

[mtlynch]

Cisco published their implementation under BSD license:

https://github.com/cisco/openh264/

[extraduder_ire]

They also make a reproducible build of it for firefox in order to shield mozilla from patent suits.

[gavinsyancey]

x264 has been around forever, and it's FOSS.

[account42]

Dude, FFMPEG has open source decoders for pretty much every codec ever created.

As the sibling points out, for H.264 we even had a high-quality open source encoder for a long time.