Well the decision at the next MTI fork in the road will be strongly influenced by this one, which is why the H.264 vs VP8 or both battle right now is so critical for vendors and worth Cisco’s $65M/10-years or whatever :). VP8-only now would make VP9 the strongest next step, while H.264 now leaves things a bit more open as vendors regroup. Google would obviously get back to pushing VP9, Mozilla seems to believe that a future Daala would be the next leap (and Cisco has some limited engagement in this), and H.265 would be there but with even worse licensing complexities, so who can tell at this point?

Microsoft is obviously another vendor to question next, but let me focus on MPEG LA. This is where the H.264 encumbrance issues could be fully solved by having this now old H.264 codec become royalty free, at least for Internet use. Cullen Jennings (here: http://bit.ly/16TJ5R1) suggests that this is something Cisco would like to see, but obviously all of the patent pool members have to agree and this will be very political and complicated. Some of them, Nokia (aka Microsoft now) in particular, are still busy suing Google to try and damage the openness of VP8, so obviously more pressure is needed on these members (I’m doing my bit in my phone choices).

So let’s put pressure on Apple, Microsoft/Nokia, MPEG LA and others to get on the Open Web train and allow H.264 video to be easy and pervasive across the Internet and mobile world, rather than simply focusing on why Cisco hasn’t achieved enough all by itself (huge though it is). Alternatively, the IETF goes with VP8 as the sole video MTI codec foe WebRTC, but I don’t know that I see this happening now (it was the obvious right answer last week…)

There are some devices that do have hardware support for VP8, but this will definitely not help it.

I assume it is about supporting Cisco’s own legacy. Migrating it all to support VP8 is probably too much of an understaking and paying the missing amount to meet the cap of MPEG-LA was a lot cheaper.

My concern is the roadmap of H.265 and VP9 here. This is what gets compromised with this move.

True. Though one may argue that not all H.264 implementations on chipsets, hardware and phones can do anything good with real time video communications. And to that point, in some cases, the access to the codec itself is either non existent or limited by the OS itself.

Definitely a good question.

I guess that non player was a tad overdone. And yes, this is the best you can get with H.264.

Question is – once you hit the horizon and need to switch to the next gen codec – which road do you take?

I also think that Cisco is laying down a challenge to Apple and Microsoft to do the same on their platforms – make H.264 “free” on their platforms to not only their own apps but to any developer, encode and decode, through WebRTC APIs.

https://www.nemertes.com/blog/did-cisco-solve-webrtc-video-codec-problem