Originally posted by V1tol
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TL;DR: The patent license structure for H.264 is fundamentally built around the final integrator paying, and you are the final integrator on a Linux machine. That's why you need to buy a keyfile to enable the GPU H.264 decoder block on a Raspberry Pi, and why the camera board has an H.264 encoding license in its price and the relevant keyfile for the GPU baked into its firmware.
Correction: It was MPEG-2 and VC-1 where they made the license optional on the earlier Pi SoCs, with the Pi4's SoC dropping hardware support for those codecs.
Back in 2015, this blog post referenced this paper, estimating that $120 of the cost of a $400 smartphone was just patent licenses, with demands typically being negoitated as a percentage share of the sale price. Really shows what a leech on society it is to allow software patenting.
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