My older Logitech C920 has an on-board H.264 encoder. Newer revisions of the same model does not.

I haven't figured out why they chose to remove it, but your point about licensing cost combined with them not advertising it much as a feature, and most of their competitors not including "proper" video encoding might explain it.

Edit: Found an official explanation here: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/video-collaboration/resources... TLDR, they figure most computers at that point had HW encoders.