Re: [Linphone-developers] linphone-desktop package and OpenH264 codec

[Greg Troxel]

Bernhard Schmidt <berni@debian.org> writes:

> But yes, thinking about it again I think the best option would be to
> disable this downloading thing. If I understand
> linphone-app/src/components/codecs/VideoCodecsModel.cpp correctly it is
> downloading from a http-location without any verification.
>
> Hoping for msx264...

I am not the least bit sure I understand, but it seems the biggest
problem is that the H.264 codec has serious patent issues, and there is
some notion that if you run the binary from Cisco you are covered by
their license.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Video_Coding

So it may be that H.264 is fundamentally incompataible with Free
Software.  Having source, and a binary, and being able to distribute the
source, and distribute and use the binary, but not being able to use a
binary compiled from the source is a fail.

That's why I suggested the notion of a package of cisco's binary in
non-free and a plugin for linphone, so as not to break the
free-software-ness of the basic linphone package.  Or really to unbreak
it, because downloading binaries at runtime is troubling.

It's great that linphone has VP8, as that appears to be Free compatible.

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