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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.

We are grateful for Cisco’s contribution, and we will add support for Cisco’s OpenH.264 binary modules to Firefox soon. These modules will be usable by downstream distributions of Firefox, as well as by any other project. In addition, we will work with Cisco to put the OpenH264 project on a sound footing and to ensure that it is governed well. We have already been collaborating very closely with Cisco on our WebRTC implementation, and we are excited to see Cisco deepening their commitment to the Open Web. Or, as Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco CTO for Collaboration puts it,

"Cisco has a long-standing history of supporting and integrating open standards, open formats and open source technologies as a model for delivering greater flexibility and interoperability to users. We look forward to collaborating with Mozilla to help bring H.264 to the Web and to the Internet."

Here’s a little more detail about how things are going to work: Cisco is going to release, under the BSD license, an H.264 stack, and build it into binary modules compiled for all popular or feasibly supportable platforms, which can be loaded into any application (including Firefox). The binary modules will be available for download from Cisco, and Cisco will pay for the patent license from the MPEG LA. Firefox will automatically download and install the appropriate binary module onto each user’s machine when needed, unless disabled in the user’s preferences.
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While Cisco’s move helps add H.264 support to Firefox on all OSes, we will continue to support VP8, both for the HTML video element and for WebRTC. VP8 and H.264 are both good codecs for WebRTC, and we believe that at this point, users are best served by having both choices.

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 encumberances. Mozilla has assembled an engineering dream team to develop Daala, including Jean-Marc Valin, co-inventor of Opus, the new standard for audio encoding; Theora project lead Tim Terriberry; and recently Xiph co-founders Jack Moffitt, author of Icecast; and Monty Montgomery, the author of Ogg Vorbis.

Cullen Jennings, Cisco Fellow, Collaboration Group, says:

"Cisco is very excited about the future of royalty free codecs. Daala is one of the most interesting ongoing technical developments in the codec space and we have been contributing to the project."

At Mozilla we always come back to the question of what’s good for the users and in this case that means interoperation of copious H.264 content across OSes and other browsers. We’ve already started looking at how to integrate the Cisco-hosted H.264 binary module, and we hope to have something ready for users in early 2014.

Cisco staged a major coup Wednesday by announcing a new initiative that is meant to turn H.264 into the default codec for real-time communication on the web: the company open-sourced its H.246 codec implementation and also announced the release of a plugin that will allow third-party developers to use H.264 without the need to pay any licensing costs. One of the first apps to make use of this is none other than Mozilla’s Firefox.

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich told me Tuesday that it intends to add H.264 to Firefox in the first half of 2014. For Mozilla, this concludes a gradual acceptance of H.264 over open video formats. But Cisco’s initiative, and its cooperation with Mozilla, has implications far beyond Firefox, as it could shape the future of voice and video chat across devices and platforms.
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Cisco’s message to developers now is: “Don’t worry about those fees; we’ll foot the bill.” The company will compile a freely downloadable component for a variety of platforms and allow developers to add it to its own apps. Any fees for the use of the format will be directly paid by Cisco.

Cisco is pressing this issue a mere week before the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is set to convene in Vancouver, where the WebRTC working group is trying to finally agree on a default codec for WebRTC. “We think this will help to push the edge over to H.264,” said Cisco’s Collaboration CTO Jonathan Rosenberg during an interview Tuesday.
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The big question: how is Google going to respond?

After Tuesday’s announcement, all eyes are going to be on Google, which has been the biggest opponent of making H.264 the default format for video communication on the web. And it’s unlikely that Google will change its position on this issue any time soon. The company has invested heavily into VP8, and started to switch its own Hangouts video chat system from H.264 to VP8 earlier this summer. “I doubt their minds will be changed by this,” agreed Rosenberg.

The other unresolved question is how this is going to affect Microsoft. The software giant came out last year with a competing proposal for the WebRTC standard that would have left it up to developers to devise which codec they’re going to use. That being said, Microsoft has also been a supporter of H.264, so this new push could possibly unite everyone except Google and further delay a standard. But Rosenberg was quick to point out that Mozilla is going to implement H.264 regardless of any IETF consensus. In the end, he speculated, it may be up to the market to decide.
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What does the future look like, and what’s in it for Cisco?

Cisco’s move may put more pressure on companies to favor H.264, but others are already thinking ahead. Google has started to add VP9, its next-generation video codec, to Chrome, while others favor H.265. Meanwhile, Mozilla has been working on a project called Daala that promises to outdo both VP9 and H.264. Eich told me that Daala may one day offer developers and browser makers alike a way to truly embrace open formats for video streaming and real-time communication. “Our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of patent encumberance,” he said.

Rosenberg, on the other hand, argued that H.264 will matter for a long time to come. “We are talking many, many years,” he told me. That also explains why Cisco is so interested in making it the default format for real-time communication. Both with its expensive hardware-based video-conferencing products and its own Jabber client, Cisco is building H.264-based solutions for the enterprise – and it wants to assure its customers that these products will continue to work and offer further interoperability in the future. Footing the bill for H.264 licenses may be a relatively small price to pay to keep Cisco relevant in this space.

Hätte man auch mit weniger einer zeile in deutscher Sprache kommentieren können, wenigstens um zu wissen worum es überhaupt geht ....

Anscheinend kann man es hier niemandem rechtmachen, mindestens einem ist es hier immer entweder zu kurz oder zu lang oder was weiß der Deubel. Hauptsache, man hat gemeckert und seinen Senf dazugegeben, auch wenn man inhaltlich sonst nichts beizutragen hat zum Thema.

Mal selber besser machen mit gutem Beispiel und eigenen Beiträgen, die den eigenen an andere angelegten Maßstäben standhalten, vorangehen!

Ob WebM und zukünftig Daala überhaupt eine Chance haben, hängt aus meiner Sicht nicht unerheblich von der Unterstützung durch Apple, Google und Microsoft ab.

Wenn die Mobilen Geräte (iOS, Android, Windows Phone/8) den Codec nicht unterstützen

oder gar in Hardware gießen (wie den .h264 Codec im iPhone), wird die Chance für diese Codecs gering sein, auch wenn sie sich auf dem Desktop verbreiten.