Firefox Going To Use Cisco's H.264 Codec

Mozilla Firefox will use the H.264 module of Cisco in the future. Cisco's implementation of the H.264 codec will now be provided free and binary forms free with Cisco assumes all the obligations of patent licenses. The H.264 video codec is patented and licensed, the rights holders MPEG LA prevents a legal use of the codecs in free software.

Therefore, the Firefox browser cannot supports codec directly, but only through the integration of platform-specific frameworks like GStreamer on Linux or Windows ' Media Foundation. But this technique is not available on all systems. With the help of Cisco's H.264 implementation, the situation will change soon.

For the video codec to be available under a BSD license and are offered free in binary form for all major operating systems to download. All license obligations to the MPEG LA takes on Cisco, which allows software like Firefox to integrate Cisco's binary module as Mozilla's technical director Brendan Eich wrote.

But the browser is not already offered with the module for download. Rather Firefox to download and install a module when a user needs it. Users can also disable the settings. Mozilla continues to work on free codecs. For Mozilla as the possible support of H.264 is a very important achievement.

After all, a large part of the available HTML5 videos can encode with H.264, as well as video conferencing systems. Calibration for the integration of a patent is affected by binary file but not a particularly in the sense of free software. Therefore, the free VP8 codec will be further supported.

The ability to use the Cisco H.264 media module in Firefox should be possible in 2014 at the beginning of the year.