H.264 is also known as “MPEG-4 Part 10 & Advaced Video Coding”.

It is a widely used compression format (=video codec) that is used extensively in the industry. This includes video conferencing systems, TV broadcasting, webcams, smartphones, etc.

It is royalty bearing and is governed by the MPEG-LA.

WebRTC and the H.264 codec

It is one of the mandatory to implement video codecs in WebRTC, and it is available in all browsers supporting WebRTC. On some Android devices, where a hardware implementation of H.264 isn’t accessible, there is no support for H.264.

A royalty free implementation known as openH264 has been introduced by Cisco and has been integrated into browser implementations.