alt Hacker NewsMoving in the right direction, but unfortunately it's still quite a few years before H264 is off patent, globally:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
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I don't think video resolution will increase all that much in the future, except for niche uses, as the resolution of the human eye becomes a limiting factor.
Read the list of patents left: a lot of them are on SVC (no one uses this) and on higher profile.
For a lot of use cases, including Basic and Main profile, H.264 is already free.
At least there are diminishing returns so H.264 will stay "good enough" for much longer.
Hey now, MP3 is still relevant even though better codecs have come (and gone)
Something tells me H264 is going to be sticking around for a while just on sheer compatibility and compute requirements
> At which point, the continued march towards higher resolution and bandwidth video will probably limit their utility
Just as the patent system intended: maximum extraction was enabled while the product was useful.