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. Do you
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.