OpenH264

    Cisco provides an OpenH264 codec (as a source and a binary), which is their of implementation H.264 codec, and they cover all licensing fees for all parties using their binary. This codec allows you to use H.264 in WebRTC with gstreamer and Firefox. It does not enable generic H.264 playback, only WebRTC (see Mozilla bug 1057646).

    The code source is available at under a BSD license. The binary is released under this agreement from Cisco: https://www.openh264.org/BINARY_LICENSE.txt

    Upstream Firefox versions download and install the OpenH264 plugin by default automatically. Due to it’s binary nature, Fedora disables this automatic download.

    A repository is distributed since Fedora 24 by default (if you have at least fedora-repos-24-0.5 package or newer). It contains OpenH264 binary , but distributed by Cisco, so that the all licensing fees are still covered by them. This repository also contains OpenH264 plugins for gstreamer and Firefox. It is disabled by default. In order to install OpenH264, you first need to enable it:

    Afterwards you need open Firefox, go to menu → Add-ons → Plugins and enable OpenH264 plugin.

    You can do a simple test whether your H.264 works in RTC on this page (check Require H.264 video).

    Manual install of binary

    Firefox config changes

    Type about:config into the Firefox address/URL field and accept the warning.

    • From the Search field type in 264 and a handful of options will appear. Give the following Preference Names a value of true by double-clicking on false:

    • Restart Firefox

    See a typo, something missing or out of date, or anything else which can be improved? Edit this document at https://pagure.io/fedora-docs/quick-docs.