Cisco and Mozilla have made an announcement - Cisco will open source an H.264 implementation and Mozilla will incorporate support for a binary version of that open source code in Firefox in 2014. But what’s behind this move…
Firefox has wrestled with the H.264 video bear for some time now. Initially Mozilla took the position that there’d be no patented royalty-bearing standards implemented in Firefox and eschewed H.264 support in HTML5’s <video> tag for Google’s VP8-based WebM. This idealised position didn’t really get traction though and slowly the resistance to H.264 dropped, first on Android and then on Windows, with the removal of blocks which stopped system-level H.264 codecs that were already installed on the host operating system being used to play H.264 content. But on Linux, for example, where there was no system-level codec for playing H.264 by default and design, there was still no way to play H.264…
So that left Mozilla in an odd position of having a browser that may or may not be able to decode H.264 depending on platform. What would work is if Mozilla could lay its hands on an open source implementation of H.264 and then incorporate that into Mozilla. But that would trigger MPEG LA’s royalty gathering. And so Mozilla was at an impasse.
Until today, when in the synchronised “dance of the contribution”, Cisco first announced that it was releasing an open source (BSD licence) implementation of H.264 called OpenH264. Cisco’s motivation here is to get H.264 as the standard for interoperable web video in WebRTC for conferencing, which is dear to Cisco’s heart and business. Open source gets you so far, but Cisco needs H.264 in browsers like Firefox without passing on the costs. Cisco has said it will do that work by releasing binary modules of the OpenH264 codec and it will take the royalty cost on.
Ah, but how will it know how much distributing those modules will cost it when the MPEG LA chaps turn up for an audit? Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO, explained that Mozilla won’t be bundling this binary module with the code. When Firefox needs the module, it will download it from Cisco and save it. Other apps will also apparently be able to make use of this downloadable module too. Eich does note that Firefox will still need AAC codecs on similar terms to the H.264 codec to complete the “industry de facto” stack for video and audio.
But here’s an interesting point. The debate about EME, the Encrypted Media Extensions for HTML5, has centred around the idea that the open web, and open web browsers, would be harmed by the presence of possible patent bearing, definitely closed source modules to perform encrypted video decoding. Now, here’s Mozilla, albeit with a different area of technology, working on how to include a platform-appropriate binary module into Firefox at runtime, as needed. It’s almost like a dry run for how EME decoders could be transparently downloaded and run. And that would be one less road-block for EME. Of course, this could also be the last thing on Mozilla’s collective mind, but the incorporation of an automatically downloaded binary module into Firefox will be a landmark in the history of the staunchly open source browser.
This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog