Re: [rtcweb] x264 vs OpenH264 (Was: On the topic of MTI video codecs)

[Emil Ivov <[e-mail]>]

Hey Olle,

On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Olle E. Johansson <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> On 01 Nov 2013, at 17:19, Emil Ivov <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 4:56 PM, Cullen Jennings <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Nov 1, 2013, at 9:14 AM, Emil Ivov <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 3:27 PM, DRAGE, Keith (Keith)
>>>> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> That ownership means they are also take responsibility for any of the liabilities arising
>>>>> from defective code they so distribute. I see no reason why Cisco would want to do
>>>>> that under anything but a controlled evironment, which would have its own set of
>>>>> non-trivial costs.
>>>>
>>>> They could have the same by distributing x264 binaries that they have
>>>> compiled by themselves.
>>>>
>>>> One of the things in the Cisco grand, that sound a bit incoherent to
>>>> me is their declared will on building a healthy open source community
>>>> around their implementation. Specifically, what baffles me is that
>>>> there is already a very well oiled implementation that does a lot more
>>>> than just baseline. That implementation already has a vibrant
>>>> community, significant popularity and, again, it sounds like it would
>>>> be considerably superior to what Cisco are planning on rolling out in
>>>> OpenH264.
>>>>
>>>> In addition to wondering at the pure waste of resources (with a casual
>>>> reference to NIH), potential contributors could legitimately ask "why
>>>> would we contribute to your project when you made the exact opposite
>>>> choice when faced with the decision?".
>>>>
>>>> Emil
>>>
>>> We considered just using x264 (I like x264 myself) that but Mozilla told us it would not work for them because it is GPL.
>>
>> It would be nice for Mozilla to comment then. They wouldn't have been
>> required to statically link against it or even distribute it. It is
>> already possible to use GPL plug-ins with Firefox, so why is x264 an
>> insurmountable problem?
>>
> Emil. If you take x264 and link into Jitsi you will have to pay license fees to MPEG-LA.
>
> If you let the Jitsi users download the codec binary from Cisco and use the plugin API which will
> be defined by the OpenH264 community you don't have to pay any license fees. Cisco will.

My question was: why not have users download x264 binaries from Cisco.
Basically, nothing changes from the current Cisco suggestion, except
for where the source code comes from.

Emil

-- 
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