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.'"

Comments

Re:Multi-Media on the Web is FUCKED

[Billly Gates]

Funny

I view Adobe as the evil money grab trying to destroy internet standards, GPL, hobbiests, and free operating systems.

Why? In 1999 Linux/FreeBSD was the ulitmate web development platform. So many tools and a cutting edge Netscape and Mozilla browsers, codecs (yes distros including them back then), and php modules galore. Today employers demand Adobe flash, adobe dreamweaver, adobe photoshop, adobe preimere, for any web development job. You need WIndows or Mac only to learn web development. Windows preferable as IE is standard.I have to pirate as I wont blow $2,000 to learn things and the cool tools of linux have to run on an ISP or another computer. That is messed up if you ask me.

Flash is terrible, insecure, hardware acceleration non existent on many platforms, non mobile friendly, and controlled by a corporation. HTML 5 is coming a long way but its a start.