<quote name="Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" date="2013-10-31" time="10:04:56 -0400">
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Antoine Musso hashar+wmf@free.fr wrote:
Le 31/10/13 10:10, Magnus Manske a écrit :
http://gigaom.com/2013/10/30/mozilla-will-add-h-264-to-firefox-as-cisco-make...
So, should we support this format now? (not advocating, just curious)
Can we get a summary?
Summarizing http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html: It seems that there's a yearly cap on the licensing fees for H.264. So Cisco is paying the cap, and then anyone can download binaries implementing the codec from them for free.
Also good reading on the topic, from one of the main authors of Opus (the best audio codec available, and it happens to be big F Free) and long time Wikipedian Greg Maxwell:
http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/571978/3226db9ce394bf07/
(LWN Subscriber link, join if you like good reporting in this area)
"Codec licensing amounts to a billion-dollar tax on communication software. In addition, it is used as a weapon between battling competitors, so it even affects people in countries without software patents." quoth Greg.
Other Greg.