If you were to look it up, you'd find the European Patent Office (EPO) runs its own courts; boards of appeal, like the USPTO PTAB/BPAI. It set precedents on itself with appeal decisions and opinions. However, it is the member states (party to the European Patent Convention (EPC)) that enforce the patents they allow the EPO to issue in their name, and they all have their own laws and courts. There has been a recent development where some of the member states entered into a unitary patent court agreement.

The EPO has widened and narrowed the scope of what it considers patentable, and that gives people trying to purposefully get a patent on something that is clearly software either more or less leeway. Obviously I'd like the EPO to be even less forgiving.

But I don't think we're going to get anywhere. The EPO neither has perfect enforcement of its no-software-patents rule, nor is it easily hoodwinked with This One Simple Trick of saying it's a hardware device. The reality is in the middle, and neither of us has a good set of comparative statistics or case studies to contrast the differing EPO and USPTO approaches, so we should probably stop.

But I stick by my original claim: I believe the reason ffmpeg and VLC have not been sued to oblivion is because they're legally based in France, where the MPEG-LA's practises aren't tolerated. The support of a "no software patents" country/government/society encouraged them to develop ffmpeg without fear; the fear we see on display here today in the USA.