openh264

Cisco published their implementation under BSD license: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/

Those PUSH_XMM/POP_XMM macros appear to be Windows-only; I think they expand to nothing on other platforms because they contain their own guard for Windows internally. If that's the case, the call sites don't need to guard for it. I'm guessing that obeying this calling convention is the purpose of those macros. https://github.com/cisco/openh264/blob/db956674bbdfbaab5acdd... https://github.com/cisco/openh264/blob/db956674bbdfbaab5acdd...

One of the linked pull requests: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/commit/db956674bbdfbaab5ac... Macros in a macro assembler .. not very nice.

Says here the Cisco codec allows you to use H.264 in WebRTC with gstreamer and Firefox. It does not enable generic H.264 playback, only WebRTC. https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2835 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264

https://github.com/cisco/openh264 can do both encode/decode.

It is kinda-sorta free and open source, though (at least the decoding part). Cisco pays for their codec, and as long as you use their implementation you are covered by their license. Specifically, to be covered you have to download a binary release from https://github.com/cisco/openh264/releases during the installation to be covered by Cisco's MPEG LA patent license, but they provide builds for most major platforms.

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 [2]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1844

The way that article is written makes it sound like a closed-source codec, but it is actually open: https://github.com/cisco/openh264 and the code is better than I expected from a commercial project, it even uses may_alias properly. I wonder why the decoder doesn't support CPU multithreading, though? Slice threads are pretty simple to add.

Firefox does auto-download an OpenH264 binary on systems without a supported H.264 decoder library (if this feature is enabled, which it isn't currently in Debian's iceweasel packages). But note that OpenH264 is free software available under the BSD license: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/ Firefox downloads binaries from Cisco because Cisco can legally distribute this software in binary form in countries where H.264 patents apply, while Mozilla can't do so directly. There was also a plan discussed to make it easy to automatically verify that the binary corresponds with the published source code, but as far as I know that work hasn't been done yet: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/893 Also, if you have the correct gstreamer H.264 plugin installed, Firefox should use that instead of downloading OpenH264.

You mean this H.264 video player? https://github.com/cisco/openh264

Interestingly, the gif->mp4 in the source link uses Constrained Baseline H264, the only profile that's supported by Cisco's BSD-licensed OpenH264[1]. The MPEG-LA patent fees are already covered, so that small projects can freely use the decoder/encoder. [1] https://github.com/cisco/openh264

Well, when I posted the comment it was like this https://github.com/cisco/openh264/blob/3747f562492ea301b84e3... view history here https://github.com/cisco/openh264/commits/master/CONTRIBUTOR...

The real challenge for Cisco is to play well with contributors. While initially, members of the project seemed to be from the same Cisco family, it looks welcoming: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/blame/master/CONTRIBUTORS