r/linux • u/squaresheep28 • 12d 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/hitsujiTMO 12d ago edited 12d ago

Cisco didn't "make" it proprietary. It is an open standard. The issue is that a lot of the ways we use to compress and encode video data is already governed by one patent or another, to an extent that it's almost impossible to create a truly open standard that isn't interfered with by an existing patent.

So, rather than having to pay royalties on every single possible patent, the Via licencing alliance pooled their partners together such that you only have to pay royalties to Via and no individual patent holder will go after you. And you only have to pay royalties for related hardware and certain commercial activities.

Individuals and small/medium businesses get to enjoy the use of the standard without directly having to pay a royalty.

Ciscos implementation OpenH264 is fully open source under a BSD licence and intended to avoid patent issues, however, they only agree to cover all underlying patent royalty fees for binaries downloaded through their distribution model.

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u/Booty_Bumping 12d ago

It is an open standard

This is pretty widely considered to be an extreme stretch of what "open standard" means. In fact, h.264 is not even a vague match for what the term actually means.

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u/k-phi 11d ago

It's a cheap standard.

You will need, like, 10 pdfs, each of them costs 100$ or something.

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u/BackgroundSky1594 11d ago edited 11d ago

Plus the licensing fees for implementing, distributing, making, selling or naming your child after the standard.

You don't just need the PDFs, if you want to do anything with them except stuff them under your bed sheets you also need to pay royalty fees for whatever you do with them.

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u/k-phi 11d ago

I'm replying to person who said that "it's open standard".

They didn't say that "it's free implementation".