Confusingly, there are two different MPEGs in this context.

MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.

The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA

So what good is it to have a separate entity doing the standard when the standard is unaffordable outside the top 500?

Arent all MPEG patents expired?

No, they’re in a patent pool. There’s what looks like a relatively up-to-date list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA#H.265/HEVC_licensors

5203 active patents for HEVC, 1480 for H.264. That's just plain insane! I get that video formats are complex, but complex enough to consist of 5000+ distinct, nontrivial inventions?

Many of those are just marginally related, and might not apply to the actual standard.

> And the MPEG folks were so cool with video, all that licensing BS. Sounds great. No thanks!

Not wrong, but this is a different topic/objection than the GP's 'being locked into Apple's ecosystem'.

And as the Wikipedia article for HEIC shows, there's plenty of support for the format, even in open source OSes.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...

As far as I know, that's only support for the container format. You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

> You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

Debian doesn't seem to have a problem with it:

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libde265

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libheif