Tweet
Wild Fox is a new fork in the Firefox development, with the authors of the modified version of Firefox intending to add features that the main Firefox build does not have, including H.264 decoding.
Firefox has not included support for several features, including H.264 decoding used by the HTML5 format, due to patent issues. However, the developers of Wild Fox says that these issues only exist in certain countries, and so they are keen to solve this issue by offering their own modified version of Firefox with support for H.264.
The patent holders of H.264 is demanding $5 million dollars from Mozilla. Mozilla is unwilling to pay this, and also to include non open source software in the releases. Without browser based H.264 decoding, many HTML5 videos, such as those offered by YouTube, will not be viewable in Firefox. Wild Fox aims to solve this impasse by producing a modified version of Firefox that uses the open source Libavcodec or the GStreamer framework, which then allows the browser to use existing codecs on the user's computer decode H.264 content.
However anyone who downloads Wild Fox in countries where the H.264 patents exists, including the United States, may in fact be breaking the law.
More:
Firefox has not included support for several features, including H.264 decoding used by the HTML5 format, due to patent issues. However, the developers of Wild Fox says that these issues only exist in certain countries, and so they are keen to solve this issue by offering their own modified version of Firefox with support for H.264.
The patent holders of H.264 is demanding $5 million dollars from Mozilla. Mozilla is unwilling to pay this, and also to include non open source software in the releases. Without browser based H.264 decoding, many HTML5 videos, such as those offered by YouTube, will not be viewable in Firefox. Wild Fox aims to solve this impasse by producing a modified version of Firefox that uses the open source Libavcodec or the GStreamer framework, which then allows the browser to use existing codecs on the user's computer decode H.264 content.
However anyone who downloads Wild Fox in countries where the H.264 patents exists, including the United States, may in fact be breaking the law.
More:
