Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ruediger 5224 days ago
> In order to "fully open source" it, they would have to include an open source H264/mp4 decoder. Which would probably not be allowed by everyone who owns H264. Alas.

There are existing open source implementations of H264. Even the best encoder (x264) is open source. But I guess there are license issues with third party code/libraries used in Flash.

1 comments

Yes there are H264 software that is released under an open source copyright licence. However the implementation might still be breech patents and might still be illegal to use.

It's a shame that a complete clean room open source implementation (e.g. x264) might still be illegal to use in some territories.

That's just the question of having a license. Not whether the implementation is open source.