In a surprising move, the maintainers of the Freedesktop SDK have announced the retirement of OpenH264 from their platform. But before proceeding, let’s clarify things.
OpenH264 is an open-source video codec library developed by Cisco (which covers the licensing fees for using the H.264 patent pool) that implements the H.264 standard, one of the world’s most widely used for compressing and decompressing video data. Now, back to the topic.
This decision comes after years of tricky maintenance challenges, unexpected security vulnerabilities, and licensing predicaments regarding Cisco’s OpenH264 libraries.
More specifically, discovering a high-severity flaw in the library’s 2.5 and earlier versions forced the issue. Updating to Cisco’s latest patched release, 2.6, introduced an ABI break that made integrating into older Freedesktop runtime branches impossible without major upheaval.
Furthermore, routine security fixes from Cisco occasionally broke the ABI, and because the binaries were shipped without modifications, the Freedesktop SDK developers had no practical way to patch or stabilize them for older runtime branches.
As a result, the Freedesktop SDK team has introduced a new extension aptly named codecs-extra. It offers libx264, libx265, and other libraries built fully from source and is expected to deliver a more reliable and legally sound codec experience for users.
With the advent of codecs-extra, which automatically installs alongside the base runtime, there is no longer a pressing need for OpenH264. According to the developers, they can now rely on a well-maintained extension instead of depending on Cisco’s domain or dealing with unreliable binary distributions.
Finally, judging by this commit, it looks like changes are already underway to remove OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK. For more information, see the announcement.
