Its no secret that FireFox was adding H264, but its now official with the announcement Cisco has acquired the patents of H264. Cisco is betting heavily on WebRTC, (a javascript powered API for real time web communication). 

Cisco’s message to developers now is: “Don’t worry about those fees; we’ll foot the bill.” The company will compile a freely downloadable component for a variety of platforms and allow developers to add it to its own apps. Any fees for the use of the format will be directly paid by Cisco. - Gigaom, Mozilla will add H.264 to Firefox as Cisco makes eleventh-hour push for WebRTC’s future

Does this mean the end of VP8? Gigaom points out Google this summer committed to VP8 for Google Hangouts.

The codec wars aren’t over either, VP9 is in the works, the next webm, Mozilla is developing its own next gen codec that they’re claiming will leapfrog H265. 

So if anything the codec wars continue. Instead of 3vix, DIVX, H264, VC-1, WebM, battle royal that waged from about 2005-current, or large battles of the early days of the internet  with many players, Sorenson, Real Video iterations Real Media, MPEG1, MPEG2, DV, DVC-PRO, WMV, we’re seeing the consolidation of power.

With codecs increasingly tied to hardware optimization, this isn’t a trend that’s about to change. At least, it’ll eventually cut down on the ridiculous overhead of HTML5 video requiring Flash fallbacks for web video for FireFox.


Also I’m quite literally the only person on Tumblr who writes about .h264, contributing increasingly to the nagging feeling that I am woefully missuing tumblr.