Comments on: Who are the Winners and Losers of the WebRTC Video Codec MTI Decision?

By: hu

hu — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 09:30:13 +0000

it is a good news. there are lots of application using h264. so it is very neccessay to support it. if you don’t. lots of developers have to do it by themselves. besides . some of my client want to me do it.

By: Lennie

Lennie — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 07:55:45 +0000

In reply to Lennie.

I was also thinking: Opera already has a MPEG-LA deal for decoding:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#Browser_support

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 07:40:57 +0000

In reply to Lennie.

Lennie,

I think I didn’t make myself clear here. Opera using any H.264 implementation exposes them to royalty payments. Using OpenH264 requires them to dynamically download that library in runtime, which won’t be easy to maintain in a piece of source code maintained by another third party (Google).

By: Lennie

Lennie — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 07:37:20 +0000

In reply to Tsahi Levent-Levi.

I doubt Chromium includes any H.264 support right now. My guess would be Chrome has it.

So if Opera adds OpenH264 to Chromium they won’t have to deal with the other H.264 implementation. It’s the Chrome team that has to deal with the merge. 😉

Also OpenH264 is an open source project. Opera can also add code to OpenH264 to make it easier to fit their needs.

Linux distributions, for decoding at least, already include gstreamer-ffmpeg decoder.

Google uses ffmpeg I believe.

Yes, Opera will have some work to do. Hopefully they are not the only ones that want this.

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 07:05:53 +0000

In reply to Lennie. Opera is based out of Chromium. They are effectively bound to Google's decisions. Replacing the video codec that Google ends up using with the OpenH264 one is going to be complicated to implement and a lot more complicated to maintain in the longer term.

By: Lennie

Lennie — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 20:38:55 +0000

In reply to Aswath Rao.

I don’t understand why you and Tsahi say Opera can’t support H.264.

Every device or browser or application can now use H.264.

Because can you just automatically download the Cisco binary from the OpenH264 site. You’ll need to include a URL and hash in your application so you can check what you downloaded was correct.

That is what Ericsson did with GStreamer:
http://www.openwebrtc.io/

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 19:30:03 +0000

In reply to Stass Soldatov. Stass, That is correct. There are questions will Microsoft really adopt VP8, but I think this step is good enough for me now. We can all complain later if they decide not to deliver :-)

By: Stass Soldatov

Stass Soldatov — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 19:24:50 +0000

That is really good news, because that means we will have IE with more-less standard WebRTC in some time.

By: Aswath Rao

Aswath Rao — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 15:51:06 +0000

So Opera does everything except H.264 to be compatible with WebRTC and forgo WebRTC label. They can interwork w all other browsers. So its user base has no impetus to change the browser on this count.

My suspicion is Mozilla went through the pain you identify for other reasons and other browsers do not have to follow their lead.

By: Philipp Hancke

Philipp Hancke — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 15:44:18 +0000

Microsoft is not going to include VP8 just because the IETF writes down a MUST in some spec. Bernard Aboba is explaining why this is not a technical issue about 15 minutes into http://www.ietf.org/audio/ietf91/ietf91-coral3-20141113-1730-pm3.mp3 (in a way such that even I can understand it 🙂