I'm not a video codec enthusiast, but it seems natural to me that low latency/real-time constraints on the encoding process is going to mean you're not benefiting from H264s full potential anyway. High profile H264 encodes are incredibly slow, and there must be other codecs that fill the streaming niche.
This may benefit hardware and corporate conferencing gear manufacturers (aka Cisco?), but I don't see how the encoder specifically benefits Firefox users.
Well it'll help interoperate with those legacy systems. It seems that VP8's libvpx implementation is likely to be better quality than this solution for a while, since it only supports Constrained Baseline (and even x264 roughly ties with VP8 when limited to that level) and won't even be available for months.
Also, if they get an AAC decoder from somewhere it'll provide H.264 decode of HTML5 video to Firefox users on XP.
I'd still like to see VP8 as the MTI in WebRTC, and I'm somewhat surprised by the timing of this announcement (i.e. nothing seems set to happen for months, so why are they talking about it other than to influence that decision?) but there's definitely pragmatic benefits for Firefox and its users.
Interoperating with legacy systems? What legacy systems? The majority of Firefox users currently don't use WebRTC with H264 streaming at all. This is a very new thing. Maintaining legacy only seems to benefit Cisco.
> if they get an AAC decoder from somewhere it'll provide H.264 decode to Firefox users on XP.
aacdec.c and friends in ffmpeg git seem to be LGPL also...
Although it's called WebRTC, and the billion or so installs of the two existing Web browsers that actually implement it both use only VP8, there's a lot of moneyed interests (like Cisco) that want to be able to inter-operate with legacy systems outside the browser. Video transcoding would really put a crimp in their plans.
And when I said "get an AAC decoder" I mean in the same sense that they get the H.264 encoder/decoder from Cisco, or the AAC and H.264 encoder/decoder from later versions of Windows or Android, with the key feature being not paying any patent fees for it.
This may benefit hardware and corporate conferencing gear manufacturers (aka Cisco?), but I don't see how the encoder specifically benefits Firefox users.