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Microsoft Going Its Own Way On Audio/Video Specification
An anonymous reader writes "Several groups are currently working on specifications for plugin-free, real-time audio and video communication. The World Wide Web Consortium has one called WebRTC, rudimentary support for which is found in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Back in August, Microsoft announced its own specification, CU-RTC-Web, because it thought WebRTC wasn't worthwhile. W3C carried out a vote to choose between the two specs, which came out strongly in favor of WebRTC. Microsoft went ahead anyway, and it has now published a prototype for the proposed specification. 'So what's Microsoft playing at, persevering with its own spec in spite of its rejection by the WebRTC group? The company's argument is twofold. First, WebRTC simply isn't complete yet, and Microsoft believes that working on its proposal can shed light on how to solve certain problems such as handling changes in network bandwidth or keeping cellular and Wi-Fi connections open in parallel to allow easy failover from one to the other. Even if Redmond's spec isn't adopted wholesale, portions of it may still be useful. Second, the company believes that WebRTC may not be as close to real standardization as its proponents might argue.'"
Microsoft has followed this path from the beginning with standards: Adopt, adapt, expand and control.
Always adding something "extra" so that other software that actually follows the standard doesn't work quite right with stuff built to Microsoft's "standard" so that the stuff built to actually follow the world standard looks inferior. :(
--Tomas
FLAC does compress it just uses lossless compression.
The issue MS has with WebRTC is that they cannot easily and reliably port the Skype protocol over to WebRTC because WebRTC is relatively high level. They propose lower level API that would allow more kinds of protocols to be implemented. They argue that higher level API would come through libraries. The WebRTC proponents argue that the core use case of WebRTC is browser to browser communication and as such the API should be higher level and if you want to do browser to Skype for example you are screwed. Frankly I think they are full of shit.
Or 4, they think they can get away with screwing everyone else and taking control of a potentially very lucrative market, like they did with:
* Internet Explorer and their custom implementations of HTML/CSS
* Their custom windows-only version of Java
* OpenXML and their subverting an entire standards body to get it ratified as a 'Standard' just so they could go after special government contracts requiring an open format, without having to give up control of the office suite space.
* Custom extensions to LDAP to hinder interoperability with Active Directory.
* Countless other things that anyone could find doing a few searches of Microsoft's history.
There's a reason Microsoft's catch phrase is "Embrace. Extend. Extinguish." and it's sad that, like an abused spouse, people keep giving Microsoft another chance because, "They will do better this time."
The WebRTC guys. Lower level API makes more sense in this case for interop with existing apps. The WebRTC guys seem to think that everything should be in the browser anyway so other software be damned.
Look up the various implementations of the standards for dealing with the offline manifest file. In this particular case, Mozilla actually caches the file (which defeats the purpose of having the offline manifest triggering updates) and Chrome and IE don't. You basically have to reconfigure your server to work around Mozilla's interpretation of the standard.
It's not only the definition of the standard, but the interpretation of the standard by each browser......and then the interpretation by the developer coding to a standard.
Bruce, Microsoft contributed the SILK codec used in Skype to the Opus project and released any related patents royalty free. I would have a hard time trusting MS if they told me the sky was blue, but they basically made the low bitrate capability of Opus legally doable.
As for those who are posting their scepticism about the opus codec's quality, the IETF standardised Opus as RFC 6716 and is making it a mandatory to implement codec for WebRTC based on it's proven performance at every applicable bitrate.
For quality comparison info:
http://opus-codec.org/comparison/
RFC 6716:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716