There are many that happened this week, both during IETF sessions and in the ecosystem, that troubled me enough to write a dedicated blog post. People from the streaming industry, and from the webrtc industry alike, are approaching OTT media in general, and webrtc specifically, the wrong way. It works, but it does not work well enough. It connects, it streams in perfect conditions, but it does not stream with good quality, at scale and in real-time. What is missing?
Continue readingMonth: July 2019
CoSMo Software is now part of INTEL Innovator program
For those who are following me on twitter @agouaillard, or are following cosmo @rtc-cosmo this is old news: CoSMo Software has been selected to be part of the INTEL Innovator program. Let’s dig into what it means really.
Continue readingFree H264 in lib #webrtc for free
Libwebrtc does not include support for H264 by default. While the code could support it, there are legal obligation when it comes to compile and distribute H.264 in your product: License and royalties! CoSMo just contributed a patch to make libwebrtc use OpenH264 (free as freedom) for encoding, and to dynamically load the Cisco provided library to make it free (free like beer).
Continue reading#WebRTC 101: 1st assignment
Now that we understand the basis of libwebrtc code management, we can start answering otherwise problematic questions. This week I was at CommConUK, and was discussing the number of contributors to libwebrtc, pointing my interlocutor to the AUTHORS file to start with. “Less than 100” was the other party position, and to be honest, I had never checked. So, who would risk a guess as to how many contributors to the webrtc stack there were in the past three years, and more importantly, how to check?
Continue reading#WebRTC 101: Fetch the source
I first started writing about libwebrtc source management, build and test systems almost 5 years ago. While the posts are still here, and mostly accurate, people forget, and/or the system as changed just enough that we need to update what is the de-facto reference for libwebrtc. As we are writing a book, with examples and illustration to be used in classrooms to teach the underlying principles, and in companies for e.g. on boarding Engineers, we though we should put some extract here.
Continue readingReal-Time AV1 (in #WebRTC) is now Production ready!
After the release of the Codec Spec in march 2018 (“frozen bitstream” and reference decoder), the next step qs to show that AV1 could be used in production. The decoder had to be made fast enough on commodity hardware, hardware vendor had to integrate AV1 support in their chips, for the base profile. Then advanced profiles (SVC, …) and modes (lossless, Real-Time) would deliver. For the work on real-time and SVC modes, a specific subgroup was created to continued the work beyond just the codec Spec. Integration with the Real-Time-Protocol (i.e. writing an AV1 RTP Payload specification), and usage of SVC in conjunction with Media Servers (RTP Header extensions, …) needed to happen. On Halloween 2018, CoSMo demo’ed live the first AV1 RTP integration in WebRTC. It did not support SVC and was not Real-Time. On June 26 2019, Cisco demonstrated live from New York the first Real-Time AV1 RTP Integration in WebRTC, through a modified version of their flagship product: webex. It denotes a new step in the evolution of AV1, one that happens 12 months earlier than anybody thought it would.
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