Last MPEG-4 Part 2 patent expires, clearing the codec worldwide

A Brazilian patent filed by Siemens AG in 2001 (BR PI0109962-0), part of the MPEG-4 Visual portfolio once managed by MPEG LA, expired on July 19, 2026. It was the final member of a patent family that had covered MPEG-4 Part 2 — the technology behind DivX and Xvid — and its lapse means the codec is now patent-free everywhere, closing a legal question that had lingered for a quarter century.

The practical impact is limited. Because Xvid’s code was already open source and most distributions worked around the licensing terms, the patent rarely blocked anyone in practice; Fedora, for instance, began shipping xvidcore in 2023 while the patent was still active. What changes now is certainty: distributors can ship MPEG-4 Part 2 encoders and decoders without any residual royalty exposure in the jurisdictions the patent covered.

The milestone does not free modern video broadly. Today’s mainstream H.264/AVC content relies on MPEG-4 Part 10, which remains firmly under patent. The expiry is more a footnote in codec history than a shift in daily workflows, but it illustrates how a single decades-old patent can quietly shape what the open-source community is legally free to distribute.