Hello Linux Geeksters. Cisco has decided to open source their H.264 codec and release it under a BSD licence, in order to facilitate the developers to integrate native H.264 support in their apps.
This is what Rowan Trollope of Cisco wrote on the Cisco blog:
We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.
H.264 is used for streaming audio and video content and has not been included by default in web browsers, since it was under a proprietary licence. The new project will be named OpenH264, providing the H.264 source code as precompiled binaries, ready to be integrated in open source browsers.
The Mozilla developers have already confirmed that they have start the work at bringing native H.264 support to the next Firefox versions.