I'm betting on Daala and Thor. Both the teams involved are motivated by the same goal to make a royalty free codec. I think the odds are good that the IETF standards process will result in combining the best ideas of Daala and Thor and reviewing them from and patent point of view. If the guys doing VP10 wanted to work with us in an open way, that would be great too.
This codec is designed more for interactive video conferencing applications and is not really great for non interactive encoding of a movie for playback. The choice of CBP came from that is what the IETF is considering to specify for the WebRTC standards.
If the x264 people think they can give x264 to Cisco under a license that we can compile it and distribute the binaries with no changes to our MPEG LA licensing agreements, tell them to get talk of me (fluffy@cisco.com) if they want to do this. I came to the conclusion Cisco could not do this without x264 giving us an appropriate license.
This is a very insightful comment. There has also been some debate about the appropriateness of non english comments and comments that only made sense in context of internal code names for Cisco projects. The high level test we used was lets get the basic code out on github as early as possible.
It costs Cisco lots (I work at cisco) as we were not close to paying the 6.5 million cap before this. Mozilla has been contributing to the code and making sure the project runs well but not towards any MPEG-LA payments. There are probably a bunch of reasons Cisco did this but making interoperable video just work on the internet would be at the top of the list. That's good for Cisco and others.
Hi, I'm one of the people working on the stuff Cisco open sourced and yes, it will be predictable and verifiable builds. We are working with some of the Mozilla folks to make sure we can do that.
How often do you expect new Cisco builds to be published? Will the releases be versioned so Firefox version X knows it will always install OpenH264 version Y from Cisco's binary blob server?
Open to suggestions but the current plan would be to make it match up roughly with the Firefox 6 week release cycle. Definitely versioned and fingerprinted such that Firefox can verify that Cisco did not compile in bad stuff.