[cpeterso]

Cisco has a lot of hardware VoIP clients that use H.264 and they want to make sure that browsers can talk to them.

Google already ships an H.264 software decoder in Chrome, so I'm surprised they would (also) ship OpenH264. Maybe they don't want to pay extra for H.264 encoding licenses or to increase compatibility with other WebRTC clients using OpenH264?

[TD-Linux]

Well, they need some H.264 encoder. Maybe they didn't want to buy the commercial license for x264. And OpenH264 is already battle tested in Firefox.