Cisco Releases Open Source "Binary Module" For H.264 In WebRTC

SD-Arcadia writes "Mozilla Blog: 'Cisco has announced today that they are going to release a gratis, high quality, open source H.264 implementation — along with gratis binary modules compiled from that source and hosted by Cisco for download. This move enables any open source project to incorporate Cisco's H.264 module without paying MEPG LA license fees. Of course, this is not a not a complete solution. In a perfect world, codecs, like other basic Internet technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and HTML, would be fully open and free for anyone to modify, recompile, and redistribute without license agreements or fees. Mozilla is fully committed to working towards that better future. To that end, we are developing Daala, a fully open next generation codec. Daala is still under development, but our goal is to leapfrog H.265 and VP9, building a codec that will be both higher-quality and free of encumbrances.'"

Comments

Hosted binaries... privacy implications?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cisco mentions that they will be hosting the binaries, which leads me to think there must be some kind of traffic analysis going on. We currently see this trend with web fonts, which are loaded from servers run by Adobe and Google for example, allowing those companies to monitor web traffic for any site that implements them. Apparently, there is a lot of value to this type of meta data, as the NSA has demonstrated. If that is what's going on here, I hope that open source projects will reject this implementation due to the privacy implications for users.