As the article points out, the traditional codec development is based on video codec developments going back 25 years (and fundamental maths going back much further) so it's not the basics that are patented. Instead it's fairly idiosyncratic design choices because that's the MVP (minimum viable patent) that you need to insert into the spec to get a share of the royalties.

In short, the patent stuff has always been mostly threats from the incumbents, which are not empty but don't actually rely on any of the underlying patents being sound. Google gets a lot of abuse from the peanut gallery for not nuking H.264 support in Chrome but they seem to be doing amazing work behind the scenes to get the incumbents on board with free codecs. Not ever going to earn you as much geek cred as rebooting video codec development down a different (and quite possibly better) path, but still a worthy endeavour in my mind.