HEIC is barely used and seems very cherry-picked to find something that IS still royalty encumbered.
>Pretty much all modern video/audio/image codecs are
The exact opposite is true. The most popular modern codecs are almost all royalty-free. WebP, AVIF, JXL are all royalty-free. VP9/AV1 are royalty-free. Opus is royalty-free.
>Pretty much all modern video/audio/image codecs are
The exact opposite is true. The most popular modern codecs are almost all royalty-free. WebP, AVIF, JXL are all royalty-free. VP9/AV1 are royalty-free. Opus is royalty-free.