November 19, 2014 at 17:56WebRTC will support VP8 and H.264
Thanks to the efforts of the people at Mozilla, WebRTC will support VP8 and H.264 video codecs. This was announced in his blog by the company's chief technologist, Andreas Gal. The WebRTC project is designed to introduce support for streaming data through the peer2peer system into browsers, which will lead to the ability to support video communication and file sharing directly in browsers, without additional plug-ins and third-party applications.
Regarding the use of audio codecs, the IETF RTCWEB Internet Standards Working Groupagreed a long time ago - it will be G.711 and Opus. But disputes over the choice and use of the video codec have been going on for several years. VP8 is a free codec and can be used without any deductions. H.264, on the other hand, is very widespread and supported by both many existing programs (you watch TV shows and films on a computer with its help), and some hardware.
As a result, Mozilla, while working with the owner of the Cisco codec, managed to create an open source codec variant, OpenH264, and build support for both codecs in the latest browser versions. Other browsers decided to follow their example, and now video support in WebRTC will look like this: all browsers will have to support both codecs, and applications other than browsers that support WebRTC will be able to support only one of them.
Full support for the standard will get rid of proprietary software (read, Skype) and give developers many new great opportunities for creativity. Meanwhile, Microsoft is already testing a version of Skype that works through WebRTC.
Regarding the use of audio codecs, the IETF RTCWEB Internet Standards Working Groupagreed a long time ago - it will be G.711 and Opus. But disputes over the choice and use of the video codec have been going on for several years. VP8 is a free codec and can be used without any deductions. H.264, on the other hand, is very widespread and supported by both many existing programs (you watch TV shows and films on a computer with its help), and some hardware.
As a result, Mozilla, while working with the owner of the Cisco codec, managed to create an open source codec variant, OpenH264, and build support for both codecs in the latest browser versions. Other browsers decided to follow their example, and now video support in WebRTC will look like this: all browsers will have to support both codecs, and applications other than browsers that support WebRTC will be able to support only one of them.
Full support for the standard will get rid of proprietary software (read, Skype) and give developers many new great opportunities for creativity. Meanwhile, Microsoft is already testing a version of Skype that works through WebRTC.