Cisco Releases Open Source "Binary Module" For H.264 In WebRTC

SD-Arcadia writes "Mozilla Blog: 'Cisco has announced today that they are going to release a gratis, high quality, open source H.264 implementation — along with gratis binary modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. This move enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco's H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees. Of course, this is not a not a complete solution. In a perfect world, codecs, like other basic Internet technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, would be fully open and free for anyone to modify, recompile, and redistribute without license agreements or fees. Mozilla is fully committed to working towards that better future. To that end, we are developing Daala, a fully open next generation codec. Daala is still under development, but our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of encumbrances.'"

Good luck with that...

[Thinine]

A modern video codec that exceeds the performance of H.265 and VP9 without violating any of the patents held by contributors to either? And one that gains the support of hardware vendors to build it into systems? Good luck.

Why not just build on VP9?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

Isn't VP9 supposed to be unencumbered by patents anyways?

Re:Good luck with that...

[CastrTroy]

I often wonder how you can guarantee something doesn't violate any patents. Since there's no requirement for how long a new product can exist before the patent holder "all-of-a-sudden" discovers that the new product is in violation of the an existing patent, and since there are so many patents out there, it would be quite hard for there to be a guarantee that something didn't violate a patent. "Submarine patents" as they are called happen all the time. You don't bring up a case as soon as some product makes it to market. You wait a few years, and after the product is a success, then you go and ask for a bunch of money. I would say that in many, if not the in the vast majority of patent infringement cases, that the people violating the existing patent unintentionally, and without knowledge of the patent existing at all, or even if they were aware of it, they read it, and interpreted it differently and figured they weren't infringing.

Daala development is just like "good math"...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Daala development is covering new grounds (yes, that's correct), and doing so in a public way. Just like the proof for the Fermat theorem was extremely useful because it created a LOT of new, *good* math (that has applications on stuff as seriously important as the entire field of cryptography) and not because it proved the Fermat theorem, Daala is already important even if the end result ends up not being the best codec under the sun. However, if you go by the result in Opus, it WILL be of extremely good quality.

Re:Why free?

[thue]

Because the H.264 video format is only worth money because of the network and incumbency effects, not because it is better. A video format is a natural monopoly [wikipedia.org]. VP8 is just as good as H.264, and free, but that is not enough to displace H.264 because H.264 has a monopoly via the network effect.

If we were talking about a program such as Photoshop, where the barriers to entry is most determined by your ability to make a better photo editor, it would not be the same thing. There is good reason that the other examples in the summary are "TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML", all of which are not terribly hard to replace, but which have powerful positions because of the network and incumbency effects.