Cisco to provide H.264 codec license free to open source developers

Cisco announced it wants to provide its H.264 video codec to open source developers for free. This way the company hopes to end the discussion on which codec will be used for WebRTC. Mozilla already expressed its interest.

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Through the WebRTC framework , a set of enhancements to  HTML 5 , it's possible to use video communication without a plugin in modern browsers. Several internet companies, including Mozilla, were against making H.264 the default codec for this purpose. While H.264 is pretty much the standard codec for HD video, companies using it, have to pay royalties to the royalty collecting organisation MPEG LA. Therefore Mozilla planned to use royalty free  video codecs like VP8 (owned by Google) or Daala (partly developed by Mozilla and the developers of the open source audio codec Ogg Vorbis) for their Firefox browser.

Cisco claims it has a long standing history of supporting and integrating open standards and has therefore made the binaries of the H.264 codec available. By using these binaries developers won't have to pay royalties as Cisco announced it will not pass on their MPEG LA licensing costs, effectively making the codec free for use in WebRTC.

Mozilla expressed its interest in implementing the H.264 codec in their Firefox browser and Firefox OS this way. According to Mozilla this way browsers can benefit from the hardware acceleration of H.264 video that's implemented in  many GPUs and SOCs. Cisco is going to release the code under the BSD license and Mozilla plans a feature where Firefox will automatically download and install the appropriate binary module when needed.

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The browser developer announced that besides support for this codec, it will continue to support VP8 and that it continues to work on the development of Daala codec . Mozilla states it hopes Daala can become an open source alternative to the H.265 and VP9 codecs .

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