True, though rumors have it we will see Safari support – they seem to be working towards that goal.

Dan,

While you are correct about quality differences of the codecs, I’d go as far as to say that it doesn’t really matter.
My issue here isn’t a technological one when it comes to the decision but rather a business/political one.
Standards choices aren’t done on tech reasoning alone: there are other things at play.
AAC-LD was good enough up until today for video conferencing and is good enough for FaceTime, so where is the real issue?
Opus is the word de-jeur, but a year or two from now there will be a better codec that will put Opus to shame. Should we wait until then? Should we replace Opus immediately at that time?

As for hardware – real time is hard. I’ve dealt with it in the past – on ARM chipsets, on Intel chipsets and on a few others. The moment you start doing things in software, on an OS that isn’t real time (iOS and Android aren’t) then coding becomes trickier and you stand to lose some of the quality of experience due to collisions with other processes.

At the end of the day, I am all for Opus. But I just think Apple isn’t.

The hardware support question is an irrelevant red herring. With the computing power in today’s mobile devices, audio codecs are not a significant burden on the CPU; an A5 should be quite capable of running the Opus encoder and decoder at ~100x realtime. Further, because audio simply doesn’t have the kind of massive parallelism that video has, dedicated hardware implementations of audio codecs really can’t provide all that much of a benefit. The only devices where hardware audio codec support is still important are extremely-low-cost embedded devices with no support for video or for general-purpose computing. That’s not the primary market for WebRTC.

Dean,

While hardware support is an issue, I think the broader story here is patents and licensing.
I am not sure if Qualcomm has or hasn’t got patent rights on H.264, if it does, then why should it switch to anything else? If it doesn’t, why should it invest in yet another video codec? Qualcomm’s strength as far as I know was never in the multimedia side, so adding codecs is a real pain for them.

For anyone wanting to hurt Apple directly, adding VP8 would do the trick for awhile 🙂

To me, the core to all of this seems to be which codecs & other bits of the voice/video stack get implemented in hardware. Clearly H264 and AMR-WB are the mainstream telecoms choices and are being instituted in the chipset part of the market.

But if Qualcomm or ARM decide to give native support for a broader set of codecs, presumably that reduces many of the barriers, even for Apple?