Mozilla has struck a deal with Cisco to add H.264 support

Oct 15, 2014 07:00 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has announced that starting on Tuesday, Firefox can use the video compression technology H.264 for online video chats that use the WebRTC standard. It won’t be able to use it for video embedded into Web pages, however.

“Today in collaboration with Cisco we are shipping support for H.264 in our WebRTC implementation. Mozilla has always been an advocate for an open Web without proprietary controls and technologies. Unfortunately, no royalty-free codec has managed to get enough adoption to become a serious competitor to H.264. Mozilla continues to support the VP8 video format, but we feel that VP8 has failed to gain sufficient adoption to replace H.264,” writes Andreas Gal, Mozilla’s Chief Technology Officer.

H.264 is a codec that dictates how high-quality videos can be squeezed down to work with an array of network connection. Companies must pay patent licensing royalties to get access to it.

The company thinks it’s best if it offers a video codec in WebRTC that maximizes interoperability, which is why H.264 makes sense.

There’s a catch, however, because implementations of H.264 are subject to a royalty bearing patent license. Since Mozilla is an open source project, the company is unable to ship the codec directly into Firefox because they want anyone to be able to distribute Firefox without paying the MPEG LA.

Mozilla has found a way to achieve this by convincing Cisco to distribute OpenH264, a free H.264 codec plugin that Firefox downloads directly from Cisco.

OpenH264 is on Github

The source code has been published on Github and the two companies have established a process by which the binary is verified as having been built from the publicly available sources, which enhances the transparency of the entire system.

Of course, this means that any Internet-connected applications can rely on OpenH264 too.

“Cisco is excited to see OpenH264 become available to Firefox users, who will then benefit from interoperability with the millions of video communications devices in production that support H.264,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer for Collaboration.

Gal added that Firefox uses OpenH264 for WebTRC only and not for the tag, because it doesn’t yet support the high profile format frequency. Mozilla will evaluate this type of support too, once the first phase has been completed.

Mozilla will continue to support the VP8 video format, but the company feels that the format has failed to gain enough support to replace H.264. Google uses VP9, VP8’s successor, for YouTube and Chrome, and they’re already working on VP10.