On July 19, 2026, the last patent covering MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual — Brazilian patent BRPI0109962B1, held by Siemens AG and administered by the VIA Licensing Alliance — expired without fanfare. After 26 years, the codec that powered the golden age of internet video is now legally free in every jurisdiction on Earth.
MPEG-4 Part 2 is the technical standard behind DivX and Xvid, the two formats that defined how people shared movies online in the early 2000s. Anyone who remembers downloading a .avi file and needing a codec pack knows the format well. The codec reached its peak when broadband became widespread and hard drive space was still precious; a full DVD-quality film could compress to 700 MB and fit on a single CD.
But patents kept it encumbered. The MPEG-4 Visual patent pool required licensing fees for commercial use. Most US and European patents expired years ago, but Brazil's patent term and filing date pushed its expiration to July 2026. That single patent in a single country was enough to make global MPEG-4 Part 2 deployment technically risky for open source projects.
That changes now. FFmpeg, GStreamer, and VLC can ship MPEG-4 Part 2 encode and decode support anywhere — including Brazil — with no IP caveats. Linux distributions that previously shipped the codec with asterisks in their licensing docs can remove them. CI/CD pipelines in video processing and media transcription can freely include MPEG-4 Part 2 without legal review.
The comparison to MP3 is instructive. When the last Fraunhofer MP3 patent expired in April 2017, Fedora shipped MP3 playback enabled by default in its next release. The practical effect was smaller than anticipated — by 2017, most projects had already bundled the codec via patent-free alternatives or just accepted the risk — but the symbolic moment mattered. It completed a chapter.
For MPEG-4 Part 2, the situation is similar. H.264 and AV1 have long since taken over as the formats of choice. But legacy MPEG-4 Part 2 content is everywhere in video archives, surveillance footage, and older broadcast workflows. Open source tools can now handle that content without carve-outs.
Phoronix covered the expiration on July 19 itself, and a Hacker News thread surfaced the news the same day. For historians of digital video, the expiration also closes the book on a colorful era. DivX started as a pirated rip of Microsoft's MPEG-4 implementation; Xvid was created specifically as a free counterpart when DivX went commercial. Both names carry a generation's worth of cultural baggage. They are now patent-free software artifacts — freely distributable, unencumbered, and quietly preserved in every major multimedia toolkit.