OpenH264 is a free software library for real-time encoding and decoding video streams in the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC format.

The announced reason was that they needed to separate it from dependencies on other Cisco code that is not intended to be open-sourced, confirm that it does not have any 0-day security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize other Cisco products using the same code, and make sure all necessary legal processes are completed.

[8] Also on the day of Cisco's free-use announcement, October 30, 2013, Brendan Eich from Mozilla wrote that it would use Cisco's binaries in future versions of Firefox to add support for H.264 to Firefox where platform codecs are not available.

[9] In October 2014, Mozilla launched Firefox 33, the first major release to support OpenH264.

[10] OpenH264 is designed to be used in applications that require encoding and decoding video in real time, such as WebRTC.