OpenH264 in Fedora

[Kevin Kofler]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Cisco has announced that they will be releasing an implementation of a
> BSD licensed H.264 (baseline profile) encoder and decoder, along with
> offering download of binaries of it under Cisco's licensing umbrella:
> http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-removes-barriers-webrtc/
> 
> The intention is that any parties capable of obtaining and running the
> provided binaries (and they intended to be maximally inclusive of
> which platforms they build for) can have a fully licensed
> implementation of H.264 at no cost.

This is not going to fly in Fedora. See the precedent of the Fluendo MP3
GStreamer codec, which is released under the same terms and which Fedora
(IMHO rightfully) refuses to ship.

> I personally believe it would probably be helpful to the discussion if
> Fedora is able to reach a (preliminary?) decision on if OpenH264 (as
> described) will be able to be used by Fedora systems (e.g. by having
> something analogous to codec buddy go install the codec to give all
> Fedora systems H.264 support) in order to provide feedback to the
> working group. If a decision to mandate H.264 in WebRTC means that
> Fedora systems would be unable to comply with the specification, that
> would be unfortunate.

Again, we have had all this with Fluendo MP3, and Codeina (the real name of
the "Codec Buddy") has been removed from Fedora. Readding it would be a step
backwards.

        Kevin Kofler