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Comment by windsurfer | Hacker News Reader

How can Firefox distribute the H.264 codecs without infringing on patents?

How do Linux distributions distribute H.264 and AAC decoders? Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does, basically everything in the world except GNUsense does--yet they do just fine with themselves.

The best solution would be to simply use system decoders, like Safari does. On Windows, this would be Directshow, on Linux this would be Gstreamer, and on OS X this would be Quicktime. The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.

> Debian does, Ubuntu does, Fedora does,

They do not. For Debian and Ubuntu, it is in Multiverse (non-free) repositories. For Fedora, it in RPM Fusion repository. In other words, there is no distribution that distributes H.264 or AAC, so system decoders would not help at all.

>The browser should have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with video and audio decoding.

I know! While we're at it, who had the brilliant idea to put image decoders in browsers? I say let QuickTime decode GIFs and PNGs.

If firfox does do it I believe they would still technically be required to pay licensing fees. The only reason they wouldn't is because mpeg la does not pursue them.

We've had that kind of "standard" for embedding movies for years. The only reason you don't know that is due to it's unpopularity.

They could take their mountain of cash and pay the licensing fee like Chrome does.

Firefox could pay the licensing fee for the copies of Firefox they distribute themselves, but they can't pay the licensing fee for unknown downstream users - the various Linux distros who build their own Firefox builds, projects like Seamonkey and Camino, any random people who want to use the Gecko source for something. Mozilla is pretty committed to making sure that anyone who uses Gecko has access to all the HTML features that Firefox has, so having a special feature-filled Mozilla-branded version and leaving everybody else out in the cold is not really an option.

Although Chrome supports H.264 video, I believe Chromium does not.

The patents (and thus the license fees) only apply to object code -- distributing the source code ain't infringing shit.

Mozilla already has compile flags that generate binaries other people aren't allowed to distribute -- the logo and trademarks are decidedly non-free, hence IceWeasel.

If Mozilla is more committed to open source ideology than making video actually work that's their choice, but they could do things differently if they wanted to.

Mozilla is a non-profit org dedicated to the open web. They can no more do things differently than a shareholder owned corporation can just decide to not make profits.

IIRC the licensing terms on MPEG4 are pretty onerous.

It's capped at a few million dollars. A pittance for Mozilla.

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