Most modern codecs (AV1, VP9, H.265) are multi-tool Swiss Army knives. Constrained baseline? Main profile? High profile? They try everything.

How a scrappy, single-mode codec became the quiet workhorse of WebRTC, Slack, and Zoom.

When Cisco open-sourced OpenH264 in 2014, they did something unusual. They didn’t just dump code over the wall. They polished it. They wrote clean C++, added explicit patents protection (yes, that’s a big deal), and ensured it was binary — not source — integrated into Firefox and Chrome.