OpenH264 is a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

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."

History

Move to free-to-use binaries

On October 30, 2013, Rowan Trollope from

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, m ...

announced that Cisco would release both binaries and

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

of an H.264

video codec A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...

called OpenH264 under the Simplified BSD license, 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 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

and ARM, and current target

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s are

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...

and later,

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, Android and iOS. 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 serve ...

from Mozilla wrote that it would use Cisco's binaries in future versions of

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curr ...

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 and ...

OpenH264 front-ends

In addition to its own decoder and the x264 encoder,

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing vide ...

supports OpenH264 as both an encoder and decoder.

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