Greetings. Cisco has announced that they will be releasing an implementation of a BSD licensed H.264 (baseline profile) encoder and decoder, along with offering download of binaries of it under Cisco's licensing umbrella: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc/ The intention is that any parties capable of obtaining and running the provided binaries (and they intended to be maximally inclusive of which platforms they build for) can have a fully licensed implementation of H.264 at no cost. This is especially relevant for the new WebRTC standard because the IETF is in the process of deciding which (if any) video codecs will be (the minimum) mandatory to implement for conformance with the specification. There has been a strong push to establish the royalty-free VP8 codec as MTI, and an equally strong push (primarily by vendors of legacy communications equipment with compatibility concerns) to establish H.264 (and not VP8) as mandatory to implement. The release of properly patent licensed gratis source available downloadable binaries has removed the strongest pragmatic arguments of the parties pushing for VP8 over H.264. ("We _can't_ conform to the spec if it mandates H.264"). It has been argued that no viable platform for WebRTC which cannot support H.264 already *and* cannot use the OpenH264 library exists or is likely to arise: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg09312.html I personally believe it would probably be helpful to the discussion if Fedora is able to reach a (preliminary?) decision on if OpenH264 (as described) will be able to be used by Fedora systems (e.g. by having something analogous to codec buddy go install the codec to give all Fedora systems H.264 support) in order to provide feedback to the working group. If a decision to mandate H.264 in WebRTC means that Fedora systems would be unable to comply with the specification, that would be unfortunate. The rtcweb WG session which will discuss MTI video codec will be on Thursday the 7th at 13:00 pacific. As usual the meeting will be streamed and anyone can participate remotely via Jabber (rtcweb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), but feedback can be provided at any time via the mailing list (and it's probably best to comment earlier rather than later, links at http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb/). -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
