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 —
No compression. No negotiation. No profile or level.
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."