The Web is an open ecosystem, generally free of proprietary control and technologies—except for video.

Today in collaboration with Cisco we are shipping support for H.264 in our WebRTC implementation. Mozilla has always been an advocate for an open Web without proprietary controls and technologies. Unfortunately, no royalty-free codec has managed to get enough adoption to become a serious competitor to H.264. Mozilla continues to support the VP8 video format, but we feel that VP8 has failed to gain sufficient adoption to replace H.264. Firefox users are best served if we offer a video codec in WebRTC that maximises interoperability, and since much existing telecommunication infrastructure uses H.264 we think this step makes sense.

The way we have structured support for H.264 with Cisco is quite interesting and noteworthy. Because H.264 implementations are subject to a royalty bearing patent license and Mozilla is an open source project, we are unable to ship H.264 in Firefox directly. We want anyone to be able to distribute Firefox without paying the MPEG LA.

Instead, Cisco has agreed to distribute OpenH264, a free H.264 codec plugin that Firefox downloads directly from Cisco. Cisco has published the source code of OpenH264 on Github and Mozilla and Cisco have established a process by which the binary is verified as having been built from the publicly available source, thereby enhancing the transparency and trustworthiness of the system.

OpenH264 is not limited to Firefox. Other Internet-connected applications can rely on it as well.

Here is how Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer for Collaboration, described today’s milestone: “Cisco is excited to see OpenH264 become available to Firefox users, who will then benefit from interoperability with the millions of video communications devices in production that support H.264”.

We will continue to work on fully open codecs and alternatives to H.264 (such as Daala), but for the time being we think that OpenH264 is a significant victory for the open Web because it allows any Internet-connected application to use the most popular video format. And while OpenH264 is not truly open, at least it is the most open widely used video codec.

Note: Firefox currently uses OpenH264 only for WebRTC and not for the <video> tag, because OpenH264 does not yet support the high profile format frequently used for streaming video. We will reconsider this once support has been added.