No compression. No negotiation. No profile or level.
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 everything openh264
there will still be a single .dll on an old hard drive, buried in a backup named final_final_3 . No compression
No one will remember why it was needed. No ticket, no Slack thread, no RFC. Just a checksum and a vague memory: "We had to ship something that played video on those old Chinese phones." They will be right
And somewhere, in a forgotten Dockerfile , a RUN wget command will point to a 404. The build will fail at 3 AM. Some on-call engineer will sigh, comment out the layer, and push a fix titled "remove openh264, nobody uses that format anymore."
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 —
