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H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

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Re: H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

#11

Post by cpeterso »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #3
leeoniya wrote: post #2

interesting that there's an encoder built in as well. wonder if they will start offloading youtube video compression onto client machines pre-upload.

The browser makers all agreed to support both VP8 and H.264 encode and decode as part of a big compromise in the IETF standards body. It means non-browser clients can implement one or the other (depending on if they're hippies or corporate) and still be able to talk to any browser (except Safari, which I think is still quiet on what it's WebRTC approach will be.

Firefox and Chrome are also shipping VP9 for WebRTC.

Re: H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

#14

Post by snuxoll »

imaginenore wrote: post #12

What kind of computer would one need to encode H.264 1080p in real time? (I assume it's all done on the CPU, not the GPU)

Depends on bitrate. I mean, my old Lumia 920 with a underpowered dual-core ARM CPU could encode 1080p at 10Mbits/sec from the camera module - really shouldn't be an issue for any modern PC to have video-conference quality video.

Re: H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

#15

Post by jallmann »

leeoniya wrote: post #2

interesting that there's an encoder built in as well. wonder if they will start offloading youtube video compression onto client machines pre-upload.

> offloading youtube video compression onto client machines

Interesting thought experiment, but there just isn't a compelling reason for doing so, and many drawbacks.

* The encoding might take a long time, users are fickle, and it and would unnecessarily drain power on laptops and mobiles. For smaller uploads where users might not notice, the transcoding farm isn't impacted as much.

* It wouldn't cover the range of codec/bitrate/resolution combinations that YouTube has to encode anyway.

* YouTube accepts a ton of input formats (thanks to FFmpeg), while this scheme would be only useful for a specific class of uploads where the browser has a decoder matching the upload (since you're technically transcoding).

* The matter of implementation: JS media handling APIs are fairly coarse (especially so WebRTC), even getting this to work in the browser would fall under the heading of "marvelous hack."

* OpenH264 supports a limited set of profiles (baseline only?), which doesn't compress nearly as well as other encoders, especially with multi-pass.

Re: H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

#16

Post by yaur »

jordache wrote: post #6

I'm surprised I have not come across OpenH264. Why is Cisco eager to pony up the license fees for users of their H264 codec?

Note that OpenH264 is terrible and probably isn't viable for anything besides video conferencing and/or screen sharing.

A couple of things from their github issues: It's much slower than x.264[1]

It only supports baseline profile and the developers aren't that interested in going beyond that[2]

IIRC this quality was lower than x.264 even when set to baseline profile... I'll see if I can dig up some statistics.

[1]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2067 [2]https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/1844

Re: H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

#17

Post by imaginenore »

snuxoll wrote: post #14
imaginenore wrote: post #12

What kind of computer would one need to encode H.264 1080p in real time? (I assume it's all done on the CPU, not the GPU)

Depends on bitrate. I mean, my old Lumia 920 with a underpowered dual-core ARM CPU could encode 1080p at 10Mbits/sec from the camera module - really shouldn't be an issue for any modern PC to have video-conference quality video.

You're confusing hardware encoding with software encoding. Your phone doesn't do it on its CPU (or GPU for that matter). The camera module usually has a separate chip for the encoding.

Re: H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50

#18

Post by acdha »

yaur wrote: post #16
jordache wrote: post #6

I'm surprised I have not come across OpenH264. Why is Cisco eager to pony up the license fees for users of their H264 codec?

Note that OpenH264 is terrible and probably isn't viable for anything besides video conferencing and/or screen sharing. A couple of things from their github issues: It's much slower than x.264[1] It only supports baseline profile and the developers aren't that interested in going beyond that[2] IIRC this quality was lower than x.264 even when set to baseline profile... I'll see if I can dig up some statistics. [1] ht…

That's a pointlessly inflammatory statement, particularly in the absence of any explanation of what you're referring to. Are you referring to code quality, the fact that it currently only supports the baseline profile, etc?
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