On the Road to WebRTC 1.0, Including VP8

Re:On the Road to WebRTC 1.0, Including VP8 by rhn_mk1 on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:41PM (#19372127)

Free software. The Cisco H.264 codec supplied with Firefox cannot be distributed with other software, despite being "open". From https://www.openh264.org/ , there seem to be licensing costs involved with the usage of this code, which have been waived for some uses, implying they were not waived for others:

> We will not pass on our MPEG-LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use on supported platforms.

EDIT: To clarify, such licensing requirements on H.264 may make codecs fall outside of the guidelines of software distributions allowing only free software, making them supply their browser without one.

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Re:On the Road to WebRTC 1.0, Including VP8 by detaro on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:45PM (#19372170)

If I remember correctly, only decoding for online video streaming doesn't require licensing fees. Cisco hits the fee cap with the products they sell already, so letting everyone use their binaries doesn't cost them anything.

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Re:On the Road to WebRTC 1.0, Including VP8 by TingPing on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @06:35PM (#19373794)

Right the core problem is you have to use their binaries so Mozilla can't build it and ship their own.

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Re:On the Road to WebRTC 1.0, Including VP8 by kodablah on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @04:45PM (#19372830)

Also includes lots of people w/ custom Chromium-based browsers that don't ship with these codecs (and libs like CEF don't compile with them enabled by default).

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