OpenH264 in Fedora

[Kevin Kofler]

Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> As per other technical/political details, Cisco is not Fluendo,

Indeed. Cisco will actually be WORSE to work with. Fluendo is a company 
focusing on GNU/Linux and GStreamer. Cisco is primarily a hardware vendor. 
The binaries they provide for their VPNs are notorious for being complete 
and utter crap. (Thankfully, there are reverse-engineered free-as-in-speech 
replacements for those.) And unfortunately, patent licensing costs for H.264 
are such that only a company with as deep pockets (and as strong motives to 
destroy patent-free codecs!) as Cisco can offer a codec with a paid patent 
license at no cost.

> Asking people to include an extra repository is no fix, it's not the
> first nor the second time that my Fedora upgrades break because the
> rpmfusion packages (specifically GStreamer ones) suddenly has the
> ability to install any sort of software in my system and mess with the
> integrity of my rpm database.

Huh? I never had any such problems with RPM Fusion Free. I'll take a codec 
built from source by RPM Fusion from the best free-as-in-speech 
implementation available (which may or may not be the Cisco one, I guess it 
won't) over a Cisco binary downloaded behind my back by a browser (against 
our policies, which very clearly disallow prebuilt binaries and automatic 
code downloads, only data auto-downloads are tolerated) any day.

> A media codec should not be a system wide component (I'd go as far as
> saying it should not be user-session wide, but application bundled).

-1, I couldn't disagree more.

A codec MUST be system-wide so that:
* all applications can use the codec and
* any fixes to the codec apply to all applications at once.

        Kevin Kofler