Cisco To Open Source H.264, Surveillance Impact?
Typically, devices using H.264 need to pay a royalty to MPEG-LA. Now Cisco has announced that they "plan to open-source [their] H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet."
The immediate benefit is for HTML5, specifically the WebRTC enhancements to better support media / video on web pages.
It might help to enable H.264 streaming for surveillance web clients (e.g., Milestone's HTML5 client uses MJPEG, not H.264). However, I do not think this will have any impact on camera manufacturers who will likely still continue to pay the relatively small royalty for H.264.
This will be HUGE for the VMS industry. HUGE.
Today if you want to use a web browser to view video you either have to install ActiveX, Silverlight or some other application or transcode the video to JPEG. This made it less than desirable. This will make it so you can play H.264 IP cameras in a web browser natively.
Open source solutions have existed for a while (namely FFmpeg/Libav). The bigger deal is that Cisco is paying the MPEG LA licensing costs for the Internet at large.
That is a pretty big deal.
There are far better solutions available. We (Network Optix) have used VP8/WebM for well over a year now.
Reading through the comments it looks like Cisco's PR person is acknowledging that people will still have to pay the MPEG-LA royalties once they've surpassed 100,000 distributions.
If you distribute it, you are subject to the MPEG-LA license rules, and Cisco has nothing to do with it. The MPEG-LA licensing rules allow you to distribute 100k copies royalty free, and after that there is a per-unit charge. Alternatively, you may elect to pay them the cap of $6.5M if you believe your distribution is that large. The cap is really meant for BIG distributions. Hope that clarifies.
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Nadee Gunasena October 31, 2013 at 9:36 am