Well, I was always saying that you need Wine+DXVK for game to work properly on Linux, no DXVK always lead to some issues with videos for people. Those who don’t have vulkan capable hardware need VP8 bundles but that’s very rare, pretty much everything in the past 10 years should support vulkan.
Speaking of patents - there is a way to avoid having to pay royalties for using h264 by using prebuilt OpenH264 binaries from Cisco. Limitations are that it only supports constrained baseline profile, must be downloaded on demand instead of bundled with software and must be optional (so there should be option for user to disable OpenH264). And I’m not 100% sure on that but I think if there is hardware codec then royalties are on hardware manufacturer rather than software that uses it. Video codecs are a patent minefield but all the royalty free codecs are designed by companies that only care about web and reducing traffic so they are all extremely computationally expensive, so h264 is still the best consumer codec that supports decent quality/compression while working well on low end hardware.