WebRTC M80 release notes announced for the first time some support for AV1 in #webrtc. This is the closest one gets from official announcement of support, but it is also difficult from the one-liner in the release note to understand what it is about and how to use it. This blog post will present some details on video codecs support in libwebrtc, position the m80 release in that scope and provide some visibility on the AV1 support in #webrtc timeline.
Continue reading#WebRTC in Google Stadia – Redefining RealTime streaming at scale
The cat is out of the box. Today, November 19th, is google official launch date for their Cloud Gaming service STADIA. Beyond the excitement it brings to the gamer in me, the satisfaction it brings to me to see a large scale #webRTC streaming service is overwhelming.
Continue readingI want to support #WebRTC, do I really need to use google library?
WebRTC has been a magical word for the best part of the 2010 decade, starting, if we had to put a date on it, with 2011 Google IO presentation. From conversations as early as 2018, and many small signs (dropping support for official mobile release in m80 release notes), it was clear that, for Google at least, the WebRTC star itself was already the past. Still, more people depend on webRTC, or want to adopt it, today than ever. What are the options out there? How should one prepare for WebRTC in 2020?
Continue readingWebRTC Standard Status Update Q3 2019
W3C TPAC @ fukuoka Japan, October 6 to 20, 2019
Greetings from Fukuoka, Japan – or, your essential update to all things WebRTC…
As ever year, the technical plenary meeting of the World Wide Web consortium took place in the fall. After Lyon, the French “culinary capital”, in 2018, it was hosted this year in Fukuoka, Japan, during the week before the first Rugby World Cup hosted by Japan.
Continue readingQuality with Real-Time OTT media? It’s all about the feedback!
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 readingCoSMo 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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