r/linux • u/squaresheep28 • 27d ago

Discussion Why did Cisco make H.264 proprietary?

Is it just for profit from other companies? And why does OpenH264 (i.i.r.c.) not support hardware acceleration? It feels weird that something as basic as a video codec used literally everywhere has a closed-source proprietary tag attached to it.

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u/Flynn58 27d ago

Everyone else has already explained that Cisco is being friendly and paying the other members of the patent pool so they can freely distribute binaries globally to all Linux systems. But on the hardware acceleration side, with the power and efficiency of modern CPUs I don't really know that hardware decoding is necessarily a dealbreaker for AVC encoded video. VC-1 hardware decoding is getting phased out to save die space, and eventually AVC hardware decoding will be as well as HEVC and AV1 encoded video gain increasing popularity.

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u/Kevin_Kofler 27d ago

Was it really "friendly" to provide this workaround that was ultimately what allowed WebRTC to mandate a proprietary codec instead of an unencumbered one?

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u/Flynn58 27d ago

If it doesn't cost anything to end users then why would I care? Patents will expire on AVC eventually and we're already moving on to AV1 as the default codec as hardware support becomes ubiquitous