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Last time this was discussed on YC: [1] Except that time it was the "Thor" codec.

MPEG-2 is effectively out of patent now for almost all uses. Here's MPEG-LA's patent list.[2] The one remaining unexpired patent [3] only applies to error correction for pay-per-view satellite broadcasts.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10042469 [2] http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Documents/m2-att1.pdf [3] https://www.google.com/patents/US7334248

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But what's the advantage of MPEG-2 over VP9? VP9 is royalty-free for all use cases and outperforms MPEG-2. Are there particular expired MPEG-2 patents that make sense to include in AV1?

The key is that now all royalty-free codecs can use MPEG-2 technologies as their base instead of having to work around the lack of them.

Okay, but which technologies in particular? Since they've already been worked around, what's the advantage?

Workarounds might have had to sacrifice efficiency or simplicity.

Might have, but again what's an example? What's a technique from MPEG-2 now available that could have improved VP9 or can improve AV1?

B-frames.

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