Have the patents for H.264 MPEG-4 AVC expired yet?

H264 is almost universally playable and transcodable by nearly everything on earth.

Wasn't Theora the set-and-forget free option? Don't recall if it had the "good" part tho.

And free and open source software can be written, shared and used without potentially getting sued. And these projects power lots of things.

Because patents cause issues for free software. Some examples:

• As far as I can tell, vlc is legal only because French law does not recognize software patents, see here.
• HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU is impossible, see here.
• I think Media Foundation is unsupported in Proton because of patents as well, though I'm having trouble finding a reliable source on that.

The devices implementing the patented codecs may become cheaper.