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I'm surprised I have not come across OpenH264. Why is Cisco eager to pony up the license fees for users of their H264 codec?

atopal 11y ago
AFAIK they don't. There is a cap on licensing for H264. Cisco is already hitting that limit with their commercial offerings, so they can essentially offer OpenH264 at zero (licensing) cost.
- clouddrover 11y ago
  Supposedly offering OpenH264 ended up costing Cisco more money in licensing fees. See Monty Montgomery's blog post from 2013 about the initial announcement of OpenH264: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html There are a couple of comments in the comments section titled "Cisco's Costs" in which Monty says that someone he knew at Cisco told him that they had been under the licensing cap and that the OpenH264 project would increase their licensing costs.
- gillianseed 11y ago
  Cisco is also a h264 patent holder, which may have given them a better licensing deal. Beyond this, Cisco is part of the 'Alliance for Open Media', consisting of Google, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla (the latter funding Daala) who are building a new royalty free codec for their needs based upon vp10, but which will make use of any useful technology their members have access to. Early days yet: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:webm/aom https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:webm/ao...
cpeterso 11y ago
Cisco has a lot of hardware VoIP clients that use H.264 and they want to make sure that browsers can talk to them. Google already ships an H.264 software decoder in Chrome, so I'm surprised they would (also) ship OpenH264. Maybe they don't want to pay extra for H.264 encoding licenses or to increase compatibility with other WebRTC clients using OpenH264?
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Well, they need some H.264 encoder. Maybe they didn't want to buy the commercial license for x264. And OpenH264 is already battle tested in Firefox.
yaur 11y ago
Note that OpenH264 is terrible and probably isn't viable for anything besides video conferencing and/or screen sharing. A couple of things from their github issues: It's much slower than x.264[1] It only supports baseline profile and the developers aren't that interested in going beyond that[2] IIRC this quality was lower than x.264 even when set to baseline profile... I'll see if I can dig up some statistics. [1]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2067 https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2067 [2]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1844 https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1844
- acdha 11y ago
  That's a pointlessly inflammatory statement, particularly in the absence of any explanation of what you're referring to. Are you referring to code quality, the fact that it currently only supports the baseline profile, etc?
  - astrange 11y ago
    The tuning is and will always be far worse than x264, because no commercial team will ever have the motivation to beat the years of video encoding maniacs' free time spent on it. Plus the Cisco employees probably aren't any good at Touhou games. Presumably they're pretty good at tuning video calls though.
    - acdha 11y ago
      Yeah, my comment now looks a bit weird after yaur silently edit the original post to add everything after the first sentence. I still think “terrible” is a bad choice of wording – “slow” would be an objective statement of fact and the fact that it's within a factor of 2-3 of x264 is worth knowing but hardly enough to say nobody could use it.
    - TD-Linux 11y ago
      x264 was and is a very good encoder for H.264, but it sounds a bit extreme to say that no one can ever beat it - real time streaming was never its primary use case. I think the real lack of motivation to improve it is because most of the interest is now in newer video formats, like VP9. Also, many of the developers of x264 were paid by the commercial licensing program, so I wouldn't say it didn't have any financial motivation. Also, I'm proof that x264, in fact, does not have a monopoly on Touhou-playing video codec developers :)
ppergame 11y ago
PR, I suspect. The license doesn't include support for H.264 Main Profile, so its utility is quite limited.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  Their licence does include all profiles of H.264, their code as yet does not.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
alex- 11y ago
The blog announcing it can be found here: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-remov... Cisco sell a number of products that use H264 and so were already paying some fees (although not necessarily the max license level) for the use of this codec.

atopal 11y ago

AFAIK they don't. There is a cap on licensing for H264. Cisco is already hitting that limit with their commercial offerings, so they can essentially offer OpenH264 at zero (licensing) cost.

clouddrover 11y ago
Supposedly offering OpenH264 ended up costing Cisco more money in licensing fees. See Monty Montgomery's blog post from 2013 about the initial announcement of OpenH264: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html There are a couple of comments in the comments section titled "Cisco's Costs" in which Monty says that someone he knew at Cisco told him that they had been under the licensing cap and that the OpenH264 project would increase their licensing costs.
gillianseed 11y ago
Cisco is also a h264 patent holder, which may have given them a better licensing deal. Beyond this, Cisco is part of the 'Alliance for Open Media', consisting of Google, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla (the latter funding Daala) who are building a new royalty free codec for their needs based upon vp10, but which will make use of any useful technology their members have access to. Early days yet: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:webm/aom https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:webm/ao...

cpeterso 11y ago

Cisco has a lot of hardware VoIP clients that use H.264 and they want to make sure that browsers can talk to them. Google already ships an H.264 software decoder in Chrome, so I'm surprised they would (also) ship OpenH264. Maybe they don't want to pay extra for H.264 encoding licenses or to increase compatibility with other WebRTC clients using OpenH264?

TD-Linux 11y ago
Well, they need some H.264 encoder. Maybe they didn't want to buy the commercial license for x264. And OpenH264 is already battle tested in Firefox.

yaur 11y ago

Note that OpenH264 is terrible and probably isn't viable for anything besides video conferencing and/or screen sharing. A couple of things from their github issues: It's much slower than x.264[1] It only supports baseline profile and the developers aren't that interested in going beyond that[2] IIRC this quality was lower than x.264 even when set to baseline profile... I'll see if I can dig up some statistics. [1]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2067 https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2067 [2]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1844 https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1844

acdha 11y ago
That's a pointlessly inflammatory statement, particularly in the absence of any explanation of what you're referring to. Are you referring to code quality, the fact that it currently only supports the baseline profile, etc?
- astrange 11y ago
  The tuning is and will always be far worse than x264, because no commercial team will ever have the motivation to beat the years of video encoding maniacs' free time spent on it. Plus the Cisco employees probably aren't any good at Touhou games. Presumably they're pretty good at tuning video calls though.
  - acdha 11y ago
    Yeah, my comment now looks a bit weird after yaur silently edit the original post to add everything after the first sentence. I still think “terrible” is a bad choice of wording – “slow” would be an objective statement of fact and the fact that it's within a factor of 2-3 of x264 is worth knowing but hardly enough to say nobody could use it.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    x264 was and is a very good encoder for H.264, but it sounds a bit extreme to say that no one can ever beat it - real time streaming was never its primary use case. I think the real lack of motivation to improve it is because most of the interest is now in newer video formats, like VP9. Also, many of the developers of x264 were paid by the commercial licensing program, so I wouldn't say it didn't have any financial motivation. Also, I'm proof that x264, in fact, does not have a monopoly on Touhou-playing video codec developers :)

ppergame 11y ago

PR, I suspect. The license doesn't include support for H.264 Main Profile, so its utility is quite limited.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Their licence does include all profiles of H.264, their code as yet does not.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

alex- 11y ago

The blog announcing it can be found here: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-remov... Cisco sell a number of products that use H264 and so were already paying some fees (although not necessarily the max license level) for the use of this codec.