OpenH264 is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

for real-time encoding and decoding video streams in the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format. It is released under the terms of the

Simplified BSD License BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...

History

Move to free-to-use binaries

On October 30, 2013,

Rowan Trollope Rowan Trollope (born 1972) is an American business executive and technology entrepreneur. He is the former CEO of Five9, a publicly traded cloud software company whom Zoom announced their intent to acquire in July 2021 The deal was terminated by ...

from

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

announced that Cisco would release both binaries and source code of an H.264 video codec called OpenH264 under the

Simplified BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD li ...

, and pay all royalties for its use to MPEG LA themselves for any software projects that use Cisco's precompiled binaries (thus making Cisco's OpenH264 ''binaries'' free to use); any software projects that use Cisco's source code instead of its binaries would be legally responsible for paying all royalties to MPEG LA themselves, however. Current target CPU architectures are x86 and ARM, and current target operating systems are Linux, Windows XP and later, Mac OS X, and Android; iOS is notably absent from this list because it doesn't allow applications to fetch and install binary modules from the Internet. Although the source code for OpenH264 already existed in October 2013 and was used internally by Cisco products, Cisco did not publish its OpenH264 codec immediately. The announced reason was that they needed to separate it from dependencies on other Cisco code that is not intended to be open-sourced, confirm that it does not have any 0-day security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize other Cisco products using the same code, and make sure all necessary legal processes are completed. Cisco published the source code of OpenH264 on December 9, 2013.

Support in Firefox

Also on the day of Cisco's free-use announcement, October 30, 2013,

Brendan Eich Brendan Eich (; born July 4, 1961) is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served ...

from

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

wrote that it would use Cisco's binaries in future versions of Firefox to add support for H.264 to Firefox where platform codecs are not available. In October 2014, Mozilla launched Firefox 33, the first major release to support OpenH264.

Capabilities

OpenH264 is designed to be used in applications that require encoding and decoding video in real time, such as

WebRTC WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication to wor ...

OpenH264 front-ends

References

External links

* {{Compression formats 2013 software C++ libraries Cisco software Free video codecs Free video software Assembly language software Software using the BSD license