Firefox 33 Integrates Cisco's OpenH264

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday July 23, 2014 @01:33AM from the monty-does-it-better dept.

NotInHere (3654617) writes As promised, version 33 of the Firefox browser will fetch the OpenH264 module from Cisco, which enables Firefox to decode and encode H.264 video, for both the <video> tag and WebRTC, which has a codec war on this matter. The module won't be a traditional NPAPI plugin, but a so-called Gecko Media Plugin (GMP), Mozilla's answer to the disliked Pepper API. Firefox had no cross-platform support for H.264 before. Note that only the particular copy of the implementation built and blessed by Cisco is licensed to use the h.264 patents.

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Re:Trusting a binary from Cisco by Anonymous Coward · 2014-07-23 03:43 · Score: 5, Interesting

Not only will it be your choice to accept the binary, but Mozilla also shares those concerns. Hence why they're sandboxing the CDM plugins to limit their access and ability to do anything except what they advertise. We'll have the choice to trust Mozilla's work, disable it, or partake in an effort to confirm that it's as legit as we want, so I honestly fail to see any major issue here.