This is the case for OpenH264. Let’s clear up a common confusion. OpenH264 is not a new codec. It is a software library (a codec implementation ) that encodes and decodes video using the standard H.264 format. What makes it special is the “Open” part.
For years, the video industry has been locked in a silent war. On one side sits the royalty-free, open-source champion, AV1. On the other, the entrenched, patent-encumbered behemoths, H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC). Caught in the crossfire is a quiet, unassuming piece of technology from Cisco Systems: .
While AV1 is hailed as the future, a truly dream scenario for the web might not involve bleeding-edge compression ratios or new hardware decoders. Instead, it would involve the universal, seamless, and unrestricted adoption of a codec we already have—one that is already installed on over a billion devices without most users even knowing it.
Cisco open-sourced the library under the BSD 2-Clause license and, crucially, paid the patent royalties for its use in web browsers. In 2013, Cisco made a deal with the MPEG LA (the patent pool for H.264): Cisco would pay a yearly cap on royalties so that any application using the binary version of OpenH264 could do so for free.
Today, OpenH264 is the fallback codec for WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. When you make a browser-based video call, you are likely using OpenH264. In the dream scenario, OpenH264 is no longer a fallback. It becomes the baseline, mandatory, and universal standard for all web video .
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