Existing licensees are grandfathered.
Really sad how companies went from making money by innovating to making money from being shitty patent trolls. Dolby have any engineers left or is it all lawyers?
dolby technologies aren’t even the most advanced, they’re just the most marketed, most expensive, most cutthroat in the industry
mm, I never really thought about that, they were just always a name in audio ever since cassette tapes for me. It’d be a shame if they had anything to do with what happened to E-mu/Ensoniq and then Creative Labs as they had so many great technologies and ideas. Consumer audio is pretty dull now honestly.
What are the alternatives
None if you want it to work on consumer hardware.
I thought h.264 patents are expired
Edit: it was patented in 2003, so 20 year period is gone already
Wikipedia covers it nicely:
Since the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003 (22 years ago) and the most commonly used profile (the High profile) was completed in June 2004[citation needed] (21 years ago), some of the relevant patents are expired by now,[75] while others are still in force in jurisdictions around the world and one of the US patents in the MPEG LA H.264 pool (granted in 2016) lasts at least until November 2030.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding?wprov=sfla1
So paying is optional? I don’t get it…
Neither do I. Most of h264 is either open domain now or it will be very soon
Hope this pushes the royalty-free alternatives more. That’s a crazy jump.
AV1 already wins handily as a codec, and the only thing keeping it from being adopted more broadly than is currently the case is lack of hardware decoders on older hardware. This problem naturally solves itself as old hardware gets replaced.
Even then, dav1d is a remarkable piece of software, and software decoding is pretty viable for AV1 thanks to it. Many places have already adopted AV1, and you should expect to keep seeing it get adopted as time goes on.
AV1 has recently gotten involved in a lawsuit by Dolby saying that they’re breaking like
54 of their patent, so there’s some issues there as well: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/av1s-open-royalty-free-promise-in-question-as-dolby-sues-snapchat-over-codec/These things always happen because of how dumb software patents are. There’s no guarantee the lawsuit will stick, nor do I necessarily expect it to
It’s even worse than that: the USPO abrogated their responsibility to evaluate patents for prior art and conflict with other patents to the courts.
So they just issue patents willy nilly and expect courts to decide which ones ‘win’.
Better hardware encoder support would help, too. It’s insanely inefficient to encode without that dedicated hardware, compared to h264/h265, where dedicated hardware support is there.
I was hoping Apple would add it when they shipped the M4, and now M5, but nope.
Hardware encoder support I think is generally less critical. Decoding is the process that needs to happen real-time, while most encoding can be done far in advance, unless you’re live broadcasting or operating at YouTube-scale.
On a media server encoding is typically done in real time
It depends on what the receiving unit can decode. Sometimes there will be transcoding, but it’s usually something you want to avoid.
While I agree, my point was that encoding needs to be more efficient, both in time, and resource consumption. That isn’t quite there yet, for AV1. It is improving, albeit slowly.
non apple chips can pretty much all hardware encode AV1 nowadays. it’s really just apple doing its own thing again
It’s too bad the GPU prices are utter insanity due to the LLM pyramid scheme poaching global RAM. I read an article yesterday that said Apple is likely eating that RAM overhead as a loss to ensure their long term strategy.
I still wonder why video is about the only thing for which a restricted format is still the “industry standard”?
We nowadays take photos in JPEG or WebP format, draw raster images in PNG or WebP format, vector graphics in SVG format, our documents are PDF or OOXML or ODF or HTML, all of which are (at least technically) open standards. Video is the only thing that still mostly runs on formats with restrictive patents.
AV1 is getting note and more common
Which royalty free alternatives exist?
Theora, VP8, VP9, and AV1 are the ones that come to mind.
What about Matroska? That was open to begin with, wasn’t it? Is it not good for streaming?
MKV is a container format for bundling together streams of audio, video, and text. It does not provide the actual video compression, which is still typically h.264 or h.265.
Understood. They mentioned mpeg4 in the text, which (because of the MP4 container) got me on that route. Thanks for the clarification.
Unrelated, screw you for getting that jingle stuck in my head for another week.
Lol what jungle? Or… do I even want to know?
The other answer you got hits it on the head already.
Here’s an additional piece of info you might like: The webm container format is actually a specific subset of Matroska. The big players in the web recognised that it was a very useful open container format and adopted it for the web. They took a subset to make implementation in browsers easier and more uniform.
I did not know that, and I do like that piece of info! Thanks!
Didn’t Dolby just sue Snap for using AV1? Claiming it uses similar techniques to h264 or 265 or something?
Shit I hadn’t heard of that. That makes me sad. I know from reading developer blogs at the time that they tried to use less established techniques in some places to try and avoid similarities. Let’s hope it proves to be enough in the lawsuit. That would be horrible if some dusty encumbant can crush the new codec at a critical time of its global adotion.
I hope this lawsuit starts a trail of failures for Dolby and they go under.
Believe its similar techniques to h.265 for AV1. That’s still going on…not sure if it will go anywhere.
4500% increase
Absolute financial parasitism. This is why we can’t have nice things. People who own a license of something critical can just sit on their asses decades on end and collect unearned income from other companies who will in turn move to cost to the consumers.
Remember when Martin Shkreli was thrown in jail for hiking the price of medicine by 5555%? That was 2017, but when something like this happens in 2026 nobody bats an eye.
No? He was arrested for securities fraud, not for increasing the price of medication.
That’s why you’re not seeing anyone bat an eye now they didn’t then either.
Medicine is not a codec.
See also: capitalism more generally
More specifically late-stage capitalism. This is a classic example of rent-seeking by a capitalist who has cornered a market.
It’s just capitalism. The fascism we’re seeing is late stage capitalism.
Well it’s their developed tech and they see streaming sites raise their prices and rake money.
Existing licences are granfathered. So this seems more like a barrier to new entrants.
They see the stupid sony lawsuit and want in.
