Firefox Bends Policy To Fit h.264 Into Picture
Mozilla has long waved the flag of Open-Source community with its vehement marketing of free and open standards but seems to have finally surrendered to the h.264 video codec. With Google's royalty-free VP8 small uptake and the domination of h.264, Mozilla has chose its video codec standard as the latter. h.264 is a joint venture of Microsoft, Apple and other companies and is currently leading the market in video compression and playback integrated in web and on devices. Mozilla has accepted h.264's supremacy on mobile systems and is ready to include the video codec to complete its shift to mobile devices.
Initially, Mozilla had fended the use of h.264, in a hope that free, open-source would finally get around, especially Google's VP8. Mozilla's belief was that using licensed codecs would take away from the users their right to personal freedom. But the policy didn't turn out to be fruitful this time. After avoiding patented codecs for the last few years, the popularity of h.264 has pushed Mozilla into reconsidering their principles.
#-Link-Snipped-#
The h.264 codec is expected to be soon accessible on Mozilla's Mozilla's Boot to Gecko project: the internet is your phone (hands-on video) - The Verge as well as Firefox for Android. Andreas Gal, Mozilla's director of research, has underlined the fact that the HTML5 content on the web will be driven by a device's hardware than its operating system for mobile systems. This would save Mozilla a total of  $5 million in licensing fees.
Though complying with a patented codec this time, Mozilla ensures that they have not changed their stand on open-source and will continue to support it, and the latest example of that would be Google's WebRTC project for  real-time communications in browsers using Javascript and HTML5.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-#Â Image Credit: #-Link-Snipped-#
Initially, Mozilla had fended the use of h.264, in a hope that free, open-source would finally get around, especially Google's VP8. Mozilla's belief was that using licensed codecs would take away from the users their right to personal freedom. But the policy didn't turn out to be fruitful this time. After avoiding patented codecs for the last few years, the popularity of h.264 has pushed Mozilla into reconsidering their principles.
#-Link-Snipped-#
The h.264 codec is expected to be soon accessible on Mozilla's Mozilla's Boot to Gecko project: the internet is your phone (hands-on video) - The Verge as well as Firefox for Android. Andreas Gal, Mozilla's director of research, has underlined the fact that the HTML5 content on the web will be driven by a device's hardware than its operating system for mobile systems. This would save Mozilla a total of  $5 million in licensing fees.
Though complying with a patented codec this time, Mozilla ensures that they have not changed their stand on open-source and will continue to support it, and the latest example of that would be Google's WebRTC project for  real-time communications in browsers using Javascript and HTML5.
Source: #-Link-Snipped-#Â Image Credit: #-Link-Snipped-#
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