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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.'"
And something with learning new tricks
Does anybody even care what Microsoft does these days? They even seem to fail at being evil, though they still try.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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
No one use IE any more.
Sure they do. They don't have the majority numbers they used to have back in the old Netscape days, but they still have market share. Any web developer worth their salt will at least use IE for testing purposes (if you're developing websites, not testing in IE for whatever reason, then you suck as a developer). I also know several people personally who use IE because it's what they're used to, and they're not power users (they have difficulty learning unfamiliar programs on their own). Even after I've spoken to them and advocated the use of Firefox (or of late, I'd advocate Chrome), they chose to continue using IE.
I'm not saying that IE is the best browser out there (although they have made great strides in standards compliance and security since the days of IE6), but to state "no one uses IE anymore" with no facts to back it up is simply short-sighted and borderline zealous.
FC Closer
Any web developer worth their salt will at least use IE for testing purposes
If you write to the standards you don't need to test in IE any more than any other browser.
If IE can't handle standard code, its somebody else's problem.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
* Anything but FLAC and Codec2 (because FLAC doesn't compress and Codec2 is voice-only and ultra-low-bandwidth).
Bruce Perens.
Here you go: comic
If IE can't handle standard code, its somebody else's problem.
Spoken like a man without clients/customers...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
As it stands, WebRTC sucks. I was hoping to utilise it in a current R&D project, but even FF and Chrome have different implementations of it to the extent tha it fails at what it's supposed to do. As such, it's in danger of becoming another mutant web standard that simply isn't, just like HTML5 video...
If IE can't handle standard code, its somebody else's problem.
It is your problem when someone using IE browses your website and the site doesn't look or work well.
Who are they going to think is an idiot, you or Microsoft? After all, most other sites they browse work fine in IE...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Please note that I did say Write to the Standard.
MS handles the standard just as well as any other browser.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Please note that I did say Write to the Standard.
MS handles the standard just as well as any other browser.
That means nothing as to how a site works though, you can "write to standards" all day long, but it's very easy to misunderstand a standard, or to simply have bugs that only surface on one browser because THEY misunderstood standards. You still have to test even when "writing to standards".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Now not only will we have separate internets for each country, so governments can decide what their people can see, but each company will have it's own proprietary browsers for their particular chunk of the internet. That is absolutely stupid, classic Microsoft! Can we change the name Steve to Wrong Way Ballmer since he keeps going the opposite direction as everyone else, invariably to Microsoft's chagrin?
In the post Flash era we are taking HUGE steps back. In-browser support for Video Codecs are neither here nor there, where we quite literally have to encode to two or even three standards. But, at least we have Wowza that can stream to various standards and Codecs. Audio is no better, with Google and Apple are using the Web Audio API while Firefox is committed to the Audio Data API, which has NOTHING in common with the Webkit standard. And the built in audio player on the Android Browser? WHAT. A. FUCKING. JOKE. And of course Apple's "HTTP Live Streaming" is NOT at all suited for actual Live Streaming. The latency is terrible!
And then we have Real Time Communication, an area that Flash excelled at with and RTMP and AMF, as well as various servers such as FMS, Wowza and SmartFox capable of facilitating chat rooms, multi-player games, even MMORPGs.
Getting data and devices streaming FROM THE BROWSER just isn't there. The support is incomplete, undecided and very much in flux. We are quite literally still a few years out from a standard and usable platform across browsers. And now we have Microsoft wading in to offer what will surely be a typical Proprietary Solution only available to Microsoft Partners and Licensees.
Frankly, this rush to kill Flash has been a self-centered money grab to try to take away the video market from Adobe and HAS FUCKED the users, leaving them with a broken internet and competing standards.
The hype of HTML5 has been years coming, with Steve Jobs and legions of techies on slashdot and other sites calling for the death of Flash.
Yet here we are, years out and we don't have anywhere near what we had with Multi-Media and Real Time Communication in 2005 with Flash.
How anyone can sit here and look at the current state of affairs and not see it as a monumental clusterfuck that is HOLDING BACK the progress and innovation we were promised with HTML5 is beyond me.
How about the REAL reason Microsoft went their own way?
Because they want to control the plan form so that if they successfully gain traction, they can start locking everyone else out. Just like they do with everything else.
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.
According to some articles I've read it is very hard to port the Skype protocol (or other protocols) to WebRTC because WebRTC is relatively high level. MS's proposal is for a lower level API that would allow different protocols to be implemented over it including Skype. They argue that higher level API would be provided through libraries.
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.
Why should *any* codec at all be built in?
Make them ALL plugins. For really popular formats, just ship the plugin with the browser by default. Browsers are bloated enough as they are - trim the binary down to the minimum possible, and only load the plugins when they are needed. This also forces the browser developer to optimize the codec plugin path well enough to stream live video, instead of optimizing the builtins and leaving the plugin ones with half-baked support.
It would also allow users to remove support for formats they don't like/want/need. Apple fans could delete everything except aac, Microsofties could delete everything except their own. RMS could delete all the non-'Free' ones.
If you write to the standards you don't need to test in IE any more than any other browser.
Clients don't care if a site is standards-compliant, they care if their potential customers will look at their site and see a hot mess. If you can give them something attractive and standards-compliant, so much the better.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"How anyone can sit here and look at the current state of affairs and not see it as a monumental clusterfuck that is HOLDING BACK the progress and innovation we were promised with HTML5 is beyond me."
If you're going to rant about taking a huge step backward, look no further than media streaming. Media streaming, where every time you want to watch the SAME video you have to download it again, wastes bandwidth, a much more precious resource than the 32GB micro-SD card you slip into your smartphone, much less the 3TB hard disk in your PC.
You're right though about "vested" interests preventing the progress of technology, from energy production to file sharing to medicine.
Why should all browsers change to communicate with Skype, instead Skype to communicate with browsers?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.