The result of that investment is that most IP based video systems and services use H.264 today, and this is not easily changed. While theories, accusations, and speculation abound, the facts are that many of the H.264 proponents are those that have invested money, and mounds of high quality engineering in IP based real-time communications outside of the web for many years now. Mozilla moved from tacit, but informal support of VP8 to definitive inclusion of H.264 Who cares about H.264? However, Mozilla now appears to be in the column in support of the H.264 proposal (or possibly H.264 & VP8), and the legal implications and licensing obligations of WebRTC’s use of H.264 are more aligned with the principles of the open web.

Materially, the possible outcomes in the debate remain the same. The main difference is there are 8 other major backers of H.264 and hundreds of millions of devices (maybe Billions) that already support H.264. At a high-level, this is not much different than what Google attempted with VP8. What Cisco is attempting to do is bear the brunt of the legal battle by assuming responsibility for H.264 royalties under specific circumstances. In concert with this announcement, Mozilla has acknowledged the contribution, and announced they will be delivering H.264 to Firefox in the near future. The newsĬisco announced this morning that they intend to remove this barrier by contributing open source H.264 implementations and absorbing the MPEG-LA licensing fees. One of the most significant barriers preventing use of H.264’s use as a Mandatory To Implement (MTI) codec for WebRTC, as stated by many vocal H.264 opponents (see passionate comments on webrtchacks), has been the patents and licensing fees associated with it. Unfortunately the attempts to avoid the lawyers have failed. Even if they did, it wouldn’t matter – lawyers use arbitrators and the legal system, not technical standards procedures to work through disagreements. Which one has more risk? It would take lots of lawyers to sort through this and no one pays for lawyers to go to standards meetings. There are certainly inherent issues with H.264. The H.264 camp speculated that there could be legal issues with VP8 despite Google’s claims otherwise. VP8 yielded no overwhelming winner (they are both great codecs), the debate has more recently revealed it’s true form as a mostly IPR related issue. While debate over the technical merits of H.264 vs. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Carol Browne Quick debate recapĮngineers don’t like lawyers, and as Victor mentioned in his post earlier this week, much of the debate over assigning a mandatory video codec for WebRTC has been about avoiding the lawyers.

Openh264 video codec