The point of buying the license keys is to enable hardware decoding of MPEG-2 and VC-1 — see for more information on why you might want this. While there was recently at the patents expiring for MPEG-2, this makes little difference to Pi users, it seems.

This video’s both a demonstration and a tutorial; for the home user, the thing you’re going to find the most useful is the ability to use your remote control to control both your TV and your Raspberry Pi and any other connected devices, without having to do any fiddling with software or hardware or having to buy anything extra like adapters or dongles. Raspberry pi zero problem with connection via ethernet. To Reddit, the front page of the internet. Become a Redditor. And subscribe to one of thousands of communities. Patch for MPEG-2, VC-1 license (self.raspberry. My guess is that it's to enable the Pi's hardware decoding of MPEG-2 and VC-1 video files without paying for.

Claims that despite the patents expiring in most countries, the Pi Foundation won't be making any changes until 2025 until all patents are expired across the world. You can still do software decoding of MPEG-2 without paying any fees, but performance is generally much worse than hardware decoding.

If you're creating a media centre and experiencing poor playback of these video files, investing in the license key may be valuable. So, if you do need hardware decoding for MPEG-2 or VC-1, you still need to pay up, unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, by buying a (I might add that I didn't believe that was official until I saw it linked from the!).