Important! More discussion on video coding formats.
So you thought that MPEG video coding formats were the end-all and be-all in video format standards? Well, for the most part, you are right, 100% correct that these are the popular and volumous formats, and are therefore least likely to fall out of modern support due to obsolescence.
But, when you look into the range of more specialized video formats used in digital cinema and professional post-production, some things might surprise you. Yes, I’ve long had the idea and understanding that one reasonably good and basic method of video compression is to simply encode each frame as a JPEG image. You still get most of the compression benefits, but you don’t have to deal with the extra programming complexity of delta frame video coding. Surprise surprise, for one point in the distant past, this video compression method was actually the preferred delivery format for digital cinema: JPEG 2000 compressed video frames with uncompressed LPCM audio.
Here is the online archive article from the IEEE Spectrum Magazine. There are no pictures in the online article, unfortunately, even though there were pictures in the magazine publication.
20181203/https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/bits-on-the-big-screen
But, since that old IEEE Spectrum article was written, that format has since fallen out of favor and popularity. True, indeed it was a critical turning point toward bringing digital cinema more mainstream by creating an open standard with minimal proprietary patent licensing issues and reasonably good existing software support. Also, the temporal compression artifacts in MPEG was considered unacceptable for fast action on the big screen at 24 frames per second, though perfectly acceptable for smaller television screens, possibly displaying video at higher frame rates.
So, the modern stuff. Nowadays we tout MPEG, MJ2 and friends as intra-frame codecs. Intra-frame coding is the use of spatial compression only to compress video, without temporal compression, motion prediction, motion compensation, and so on.
And no, Wikipedia does not have a list of patents article for H.264, but we do know that most of the core patents are expiring a couple of years from now, 2023/2024. The important core parts of the standard were finalized 2003/2004. Chances are this patent expiration will be the same as the last, MPEG-2. Although the newest stuff will no longer use it, there will still be important users of the video standard, as there were back in its heyday. Just as MPEG-2 is still the standard for DVD Video, digital video broadcast, and standard definition video capture applications, H.264 MPEG-4 will still be the standard for standard/high definition Internet video streaming. It’s just that the second time through, there will be no patents to worry about anymore. So, relax! Go ahead and start programming, developing, recording, and producing against the de facto standard of today, H.264 MPEG-4, and rest assured that it will still be a viable standard a few years from now, still widely used and adopted, but without patents the next time through.
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG_2000
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intra-frame_coding
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFV1
20181113/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_ProRes
Well, the JPEG 2000 standards sure were nice from a conceptual and mathematical standpoint, but unfortunately, ultimately the format did not become very popular with applications and users. Without lots of data, a data file format standard is basically nothing from a de facto standpoint.