OpenH264 is an implementation of the H.264 video codec.
It was released as open source by Cisco, who have paid royalties for it to the MPEG-LA.
To avoid royalty payments, the OpenH264 implementation can only be used in its binary form and only if downloaded dynamically by an application and not pre-packaged in advance.
The idea behind the OpenH264 initiative is that by making it freely available, it gives H.264 more of a chance to become the mandatory to implement video codec in WebRTC.
Mozilla makes use of OpenH264 in Firefox.
