OpenH264 in Fedora

[Alberto Ruiz]

On Sat, 2013-11-02 at 21:29 +0100, Björn Persson wrote:
> Fedora mustn't have third-party repositories like RPM Fusion enabled by
> default. Users must consciously configure them.
> Therefore Fedora mustn't download Cisco's binaries by default. It will
> have to be something that users must consciously configure.

It can ask the user whether he wants to opt-in/out for the plugin installation, removing this mechanism at all won't help the users.

> So what's the big deal? If Cisco goes through with this, then there
> will be one more free but patent-encumbered implementation. Another
> implementation doesn't hurt, but I don't see how it solves any
> fundamental problems.

It solves a fundamental problem, you have to pay MPEG-LA a license to
distribute binaries, so now we have a source that is willing to produce
binaries for as many architectures as we need that are licensed by
MPEG-LA.

So now any user is one click away from being able to access content
widely available in the web (which is sadly going through the HTML5
spec).

We still have a problem with MP3, but it does solve a fundamental
problem.

>  The only news is that Cisco will hand out blobs
> with gratis patent licenses for some time. Establishing a standard
> based on the assumption that Cisco will continue doing that
> indefinitely seems like a bad idea.

Is better than nothing, we can always fall back to what we do now once
they stop doing that.

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz