Cisco plans to open-source H.264 code, widen support for web-based video chat

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Fr, 2013-11-01 at 09:13 +0100, Sebastian Dröge wrote:
> On Fr, 2013-11-01 at 08:06 +0100, elio francesconi wrote:
> > Dear all,
> > I want to share with you this important news to know your opinion.
> > Reading briefly this article it seems that Cisco, the codec's owner don't
> > want royalties anymore.
> > What does it means, pratically?
> 
> In practise that means that if you download the binary from Cisco and
> use that for h264, you'll have a h264 license.
> 
> If you build from their sources (with or without modifications) your
> binary won't be covered, if you do h264 with another implementation
> (e.g. libav or x264) this won't be covered either. Also it's unclear if
> the binary can be redistributed and if usage of it conflicts with e.g.
> the GPL, and e.g. Debian can't ship it. So overall the usefulness seems
> rather limited to me, especially this doesn't make the situation better
> for open source projects in general and doesn't make the codec a free
> (as in freedom) codec.

However what it helps with is h264 support in browsers for example.
Firefox could get a plugin that uses this binary codec, and download it
from the Cisco website. That's what is planned AFAIU, and it would
improve the user experience with Firefox currently as there many
websites that only provide videos as h264.

-- 
Sebastian Dröge <sebastian at centricular.com>
Centricular Ltd - http://www.centricular.com
Expertise, Straight from the Source
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