Who pays for H.264?
Confusion over the H.264 patents causes distros to drop support.
Do you need to pay a licence fee to use the H.264 encoder/decoder? Apparently, that’s not a simple question to answer. Fedora recently decided not to find out, and simply removed support for H.264, H.265 and VC-1 codecs. It hadn’t actually been approached by the patent-holders, but opted to preemptively avoid any legal issues. OpenSUSE soon followed, while Red Hat also jumped ship last year.
The patents for H.264, and H.265 are held by a company called MPEG LA, an outfit that specialises in holding patents in video codecs. And the answer to our original question is: it depends. Put crudely, the answer is no if you distribute free content in H.264, on YouTube for example. It’s yes if you include the actual encoder/decoder in any form, including as part of free software. However, calling an external API doesn’t count.
If you charge for H.264 content, you also need a licence, so Netflix has to pay. Sounds simple in theory, but MPEG LA’s licence agreement still leaves many areas uncertain, especially where multiple parties are involved. This confusion has prompted organisations to ditch or limit H.264 use. Simply charging a licence fee acts as a brake on support, given there are perfectly capable free alternatives such as AV1 or V9 (although Google holds some patents on that). Using H.264 can get expensive, too, if you are hitting six figures for distribution. MPEG LA’s motives are financial, and that patent has a rapidly approaching expiration date (2024, unless extended). Perhaps H.264 will recover; perhaps its rivals will prevail. Currently, it’s a bit of a mess.