H.264 is supported in WebRTC from Chrome 50 • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by gillianseed » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 12:40 AM UTC

atopal wrote: post #7

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?

AFAIK they don't. There is a cap on licensing for H264. Cisco is already hitting that limit with their commercial offerings, so they can essentially offer OpenH264 at zero (licensing) cost.

Cisco is also a h264 patent holder, which may have given them a better licensing deal.

Beyond this, Cisco is part of the 'Alliance for Open Media', consisting of Google, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla (the latter funding Daala) who are building a new royalty free codec for their needs based upon vp10, but which will make use of any useful technology their members have access to.

Early days yet:

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/#/q/project:webm/ao...

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

#42

Post by the8472 » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 12:48 AM UTC

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 how good you want the results to be. software encoders generally allow you to make tradeoffs in the bitrate-cpu-quality triangle.

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

#43

Post by ksec » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 4:30 AM UTC

And HEVC licensing is still a bag of hurt.

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

#44

Post by dk8996 » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 4:35 AM UTC

How big of a deal is this? Is there any new use-case that can be gained by this tech?

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

#45

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 4:43 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #26

ppergame wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PR, I suspect. The license doesn't include support for H.264 Main Profile, so its utility is quite limited.

Their licence does include all profiles of H.264, their code as yet does not.

[deleted]

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

#46

Post by ex3ndr » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 5:29 AM UTC

xgbi wrote: post #30

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)

We (linphone) do H264 software encoding and reach 720 on high-end iPhones (5s and more). So 1080 should be doable in realtime with, say, 20 fps, on an i5 I'd say?

Are you using hardware accelerated encoding on iOS?

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

#47

Post by TD-Linux » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 7:04 AM UTC

dk8996 wrote: post #44

How big of a deal is this? Is there any new use-case that can be gained by this tech?

It means that WebRTC can interoperate with legacy equipment without transcoding.

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

#48

Post by Excavator » Sat, Mar 05, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

jallmann wrote: post #9

VuWall-Matt wrote: post #4

Would this mean that you can encode the Chrome windows itself and send it off over the network to be decoded by, well, anything that decodes H.264, possibly another Chrome window's decoder?

Yes, with the mediaSource constraint you can do screen sharing in WebRTC, but that's not anything specific to H.264.

For a demo of screen, window, and application sharing see:

https://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/gum_test.html

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

#49

Post by xgbi » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 9:11 AM UTC

ex3ndr wrote: post #46

xgbi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (linphone) do H264 software encoding and reach 720 on high-end iPhones (5s and more). So 1080 should be doable in realtime with, say, 20 fps, on an i5 I'd say?

Are you using hardware accelerated encoding on iOS?

As I said, software encoding. Hardware encoding is coming but not yet there.