Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 16th Oct 2009 21:26 UTC
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RE[4]: Far too much text for me
by ichi on Mon 19th Oct 2009 14:33
in reply to "RE[3]: Far too much text for me"
Non-issue: Chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-nonfree.
"This package contains the multi-threaded ffmpeg codecs needed for the HTML5 audio and video tags. In addition to the free ogg, vorbis and theora codecs, H.264, MP3 and AAC are also included. See chromium-codecs-ffmpeg if you prefer only the free codecs"




Member since:
2005-07-20
To begin with, H.264 isn't a proprietary codec. It's an ISO and ITU standard.
What is the problem is that you need to pay license fees to actually use it. If you provide it in source-only form then the consensus is that you don't need to pay any fees but if you provide binaries, you need to pay fees. To address this, Google pays the license for Chrome even though they don't charge their users whereas Chromium, the open source project, doesn't pay any fees and isn't allowed to distribute the AVC codec in binary form and apparently doesn't provide it in source form either.