proprietary_codecs and licensing FAQ

[DanKegel]

I am happy that turning on h.264 support via
export GN_DEFINES="ffmpeg_branding=Chrome proprietary_codecs=true use_sysroot=false"
is so easy.

I understand that this enables encoding via OpenH264 and decoding via ffmpeg
(as described by https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6417796455989248 ).

This raises a few questions:

1) I gather cef uses the binary OpenH264 as described at http://www.openh264.org/faq.html
which eases licensing concerns. (Indeed, I can't imagine chromium merging
h264 support without that.) Can you confirm?

2) After https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/is ... ?id=746579
lands in cef, what are the remaining licensing implications for turning on
proprietary_codecs ? e.g. what's the easiest way to come into licensing
compliance for something you want to redistribute?

3) I see there are simple tests for h.264 and webrtc available on the web, e.g.
http://html5test.com/
https://www.webrtc-experiment.com/DetectRTC/
but I don't think I've seen one that shows results for encoding and decoding
separately. Anyone know of a test page that is designed to
help answer licensing questions (like, "You have these three
codecs enabled, see these three licensing FAQs")

Thanks!

[magreenblatt]

#1: As far as I know Chromium uses ffmpeg exclusively for encoding and decoding on desktop platforms.

#2, #3: Anything not supported by the default build after the Chromium changes land will require a license (e.g. enabling proprietary_codecs will require a license). You can look at the delta of supported codecs and Google for the appropriate licensing body. Last I checked it was MPEG-LA for h264 and Via Corp for AAC.