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

["Olle E. Johansson" <[e-mail]>]

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.

It's all about the money. Make sure you join that API discussion so you can use it in Jitsi.
I would like that. :-)

The same applies to Mozilla/Firefox.
/O