Comments on: When will Zoom use WebRTC?

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Thu, 13 May 2021 20:18:58 +0000

In reply to Brad. Thanks Brad. Didn't know this tidbit about Zoom and Chromebooks.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 13 May 2021 20:14:55 +0000

Thanks for this post, it was informative.
I did want to dispute the “it just works” positive bullet point for zoom.
It hardly works at all on chromebooks.

Google Meet is 100% fine, but zoom will choke a chromebook to death.

By: james

james — Sat, 20 Jun 2020 22:33:21 +0000

Jitsi meet is a great alternative that is already fully webrtc and can handle quite a lot of people based on your server specifications. Another one is running Nextcloud talk, not sure how that compares in performance with the number of people, but becuase of its use of webrtc will run in browsers without any need for installing software, desktop and mobile.

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Fri, 22 May 2020 20:13:26 +0000

In reply to John Coonrod. I don't envision this coming any time soon I am afraid.

By: John Coonrod

John Coonrod — Fri, 22 May 2020 20:01:14 +0000

If found this article, because of my experience in how badly Zoom performs on chromebooks. Given the new “mainstreaming” of Zoom during the pandemic, we chromebook users are extremely frustrated. So I eagerly await Zoom’s full conversion to webRTC – like, say Microsoft Teams versus Skype-for-Business.

By: Nir Simionovich

Nir Simionovich — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 12:43:45 +0000

Here is how I see it. WebRTC is a full suite of “capabilities” that you can use in multiple ways. You’re not really “forced” to use them in a traditional manner, but as long as you, things are fairly clean and simple.

The interesting things happen when you roam outside of the “normal” usage. For example, we use WebRTC in our mobile SDKs, mainly for its media processing capabilities. We don’t really use any of the “browser” stack, simply because – there is no browser involved. The result is very “unique” as we enjoy the various “internal” smarts of WebRTC and codec handling, while we add our own smarts into how to use these.

The switch from “proprietary codecs/standard signalling” to “standard codecs/proprietary signalling” was exactly where WebRTC was going. Allowing each vendor to create their own “usage” pattern of the underlying technology. So, you have agora.io, zoom, jitsi and others – here’s my challenge to you, make them talk to each other – will not happen.

“As WebRTC democratized communications it also killed a lot of what proprietary optimizations in the codec level can do to assist in gaining a competitive advantage.” – yes, that is correct. But opened at the same time a new realm of innovation and ideas, which is, how to monetise the signalling environment. I believe that while Zoom’s decision may be “questionable” or “weird” to some – I’m confident this is nothing more than a prelude to something new.

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 10:33:30 +0000

In reply to Frederic Navarre.

Frederic,

RTCP isn’t signaling, at least not the way I see it. My thinking is that shifting from RTP and RTCP to QUIC (HTTP/3) is the right long term approach and I’ve written about it here in the past.

As for Salsify, it has nothing to do with protocols. As far as I can understand it is just an implementation detail on how to get codecs and transport to work better together, and frankly? Everyone’s been doing that (at least in intent) since the early days of video conferencing – I remember we did similar things at RADVISION 15+ years ago. Can WebRTC be improved? Definitely. But a lot of that improvement relies on the code that ends up implemented inside web browsers.

By: Frederic Navarre

Frederic Navarre — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 09:53:31 +0000

I like the analysis in “The end of proprietary communications”, as we are moving indeed from proprietary codecs to proprietary signaling.
But keeping using old protocols such as RTCP and co, could prevent real innovations from taking place : what do you think of https://snr.stanford.edu/salsify/ for instance ?

By: Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 04:42:22 +0000

In reply to Douglas Niedt. Douglas, I guess different people have different experiences with media quality of the various services out there. Most people I've talked to are happy with Zoom.

By: Douglas Niedt

Douglas Niedt — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 02:15:04 +0000

My problem with Zoom is its horrible audio quality. Video is not bad but their audio is horrendous. And their techs have no solution.