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

[Olivier Crête]

Hi,

On Fri, 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.


Also, the openh264 code only supports the baseline profile, so it's not
very useful outside of a video calling use case.

If you could re-distribute it and still be licensed, I expect Firefox
would do that instead of downloading it from Cisco, so redistribution
probably isn't covered either.

That said, I expect we'll make a GStreamer element to wrap it when it
appears, but it's not actually very useful in itself.

-- 
Olivier Crête
olivier.crete at collabora.com