The Last MPEG-4 Video Patent Expires, Freeing DivX and Xvid Worldwide
After more than two decades of patent encumbrance, the final MPEG-4 Part 2 patent — held by Siemens AG in Brazil — expired on July 19, 2026, making the codec that powered DivX and Xvid free to use anywhere in the world.
AI-Generated · qwen3.6:latestFor anyone who spent the early 2000s ripping DVDs and building a DivX collection on a 486, it might take a moment to process just how monumental this is. On July 19, 2026, the last remaining patent covering MPEG-4 Visual (MPEG-4 Part 2) expired — not in the US, not in the EU, but in Brazil, where patent law had kept one specific claim active while the rest of the world watched its corresponding patents lapse years ago. As Phoronix reported on the day, the expiration of Brazilian patent BRPI0109962B1 — titled “process for storing and processing image information from successive images over time” — marks the first time MPEG-4 Part 2 has ever been fully free of patent restrictions anywhere on Earth.
BRPI010109962B1 was held by Siemens AG, which filed it as part of its broader portfolio of MPEG-4 Visual patents licensed through the VIA Licensing Alliance. The VIA alliance confirmed today that this is indeed the final patent standing between MPEG-4 Part 2 and a truly patent-free global status. Linuxiac’s coverage went further in explaining what this means for the open-source ecosystem: DivX and Xvid codecs are now completely free to encode, decode, redistribute, and integrate into any software project around the world — with no licensing fees owing anyone.
That sounds like a straightforward win, and it is — but understanding why it matters requires a little history. MPEG-4 Part 2 was released in 1999 as an open alternative to proprietary codecs at a time when video compression was dominated by tightly controlled standards bodies. Its most famous implementations were DivX (which took its name from the marketing campaign rather than any actual MPEG standard) and Xvid, which emerged as a fully open-source response after the original DivX codec’s source code was released under an open license. They powered a generation of early streaming, DVD backup tools, and P2P video sharing — they were what people used when YouTube didn’t exist and bandwidth was measured in kilobits per second.
The thing that made the MPEG-4 Part 2 patent landscape so uniquely frustrating is that it never cleared out uniformly. While US and EU patents covering various aspects of MPEG-4 Visual expired over the years (some as early as 2016, others gradually throughout the 2020s), Brazil’s patent system operated on a different timeline. Siemens’ BRPI0109962B1 sat untouched for decades because it covered a specific implementation detail — image processing techniques applied across successive frames — that didn’t expire under Brazilian law until its 20-year term ran out earlier this month. The Wikipedia entry for MPEG-4 Visual covers this topic broadly.
This expiration is significant because ffmpeg — the universal media processing tool at the heart of Linux video tooling, every YouTube upload service that doesn’t use YouTube’s proprietary pipeline, and most open-source media applications — can now integrate MPEG-4 Part 2 encoding and decoding without worrying about any jurisdiction. While the FFmpeg project itself has always been technically free to build around this patent gap (no one actually enforced Brazilian patents against a Swiss-based project), downstream distributors embedding libavcodec in commercial products had always carried a small legal uncertainty that is now fully resolved.
It’s worth noting what this does not mean: MPEG-4 Part 2 is not the same thing as the broader MP4 container format or H.264/AVC, and neither of those are patent-free. ByteIota reported that the MPEG-4 Visual expiration does not touch the extensive patent thicket surrounding H.264, which is managed by a separate licensing pool and remains encumbered in many jurisdictions well into the 2030s. It doesn’t touch HEVC or AV1 either. The victory here is specific to MPEG-4 Part 2 — the codec itself, not its container format (which was never patented), nor its successors.
Still, for those building lightweight video pipelines on Linux, the impact is real. MPEG-4 Part 2 remains a practical choice for applications where compression fidelity matters less than compatibility and computational efficiency — embedded devices, retro-gaming emulators with video output features, and tools that need to produce files playable on hardware from the early 2000s will continue to find MPEG-4 Part 2 a useful tool. The codec’s simplicity is now a legal advantage as well as an engineering one.
The expiration also comes at a moment when open video formats are more relevant than ever. With patent encumbrances on both H.264 and its successor H.265 keeping AV1 — developed by the Alliance for Open Media, backed by Google, Mozilla, Apple, and others — as the primary free option in modern codecs, every patent-free codec is a useful addition to the toolkit. MPEG-4 Part 2 won’t replace VP9 or AV1 for new content, but for legacy compatibility (and it remains widely supported on practically any device manufactured after about 2003), it’s now officially clear ground.
MPEG-4 Visual was one of the most downloaded codecs in history at its peak. Its patents were never removed from their licensors’ portfolios because they slowly faded into irrelevance rather than expiring all at once — until today, when the last piece simply ran out. As Michael Larabel wrote on Phoronix: “Great to see this day finally realized given the prevalence of MPEG-4.” It was always going to reach this point eventually; the question for anyone licensing or integrating a codec that uses it was just how long they had to factor in the uncertainty. The answer, from July 19 onward, is none at all.