After the patents expire and the lawyers go home, after the build pipelines are decommissioned, after the last browser telemetry ping reports codec not found —
there will still be a single .dll on an old hard drive, buried in a backup named final_final_3 . after everything openh264
After everything — the codec outlives the code, the standard outlives the standard-bearers, and the silence after a video ends is just silence again. After the patents expire and the lawyers go
They will be right. And they will never know the wars that were fought in IETF meeting rooms, the drafts, the objections, the last-minute concessions, just to make that wget work at all. after the build pipelines are decommissioned
No compression. No negotiation. No profile or level.