on that note, does anyone know what patents for h.264 are still valid, and for how much longer? I've been looking for that info for quite a while now, without success.
So 15 more years, basically. Man, that's depressing. What's fast becoming the standard for HTML5 video has 15 more years of not being truly free. I wonder what mozilla will do about that.
The problem is, with these perpetual upgrades (which undoubtedly will be patented from the the present time) they want to stretch it well beyond 15 years. Luckily H.264 is not a standard in any way, since W3C removed any specific codecs from the video/audio tag spec.