Re: [rtcweb] Stephan Wenger's choices

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <[e-mail]>]

* Ron wrote:
>On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 05:22:29PM +0000, Stephan Wenger wrote:
>> Please don¹t forget that in the IETF process statements like this are my
>> own, whereas in W3C, I clearly and expressly was representing my then
>> employer and was bound by in-house guidance (and so were most people
>> presenting opinions).  W3C is a membership organization and the IETF is
>> not--different rules apply.
>
>With that in mind, the statement in that paper that it was your personal
>experience that the quality of H.261 was acceptably sufficient does still
>seem like a notable data point.  And seems to accord with what anyone who
>has actually looked at it seems to have found too.
>
>I'm not sure what some of the people who have claimed it is unacceptable
>even as a fallback on quality grounds are basing that assertion on if it
>is something more than glossolalia.  It would be nice to know what their
>objective standard for acceptable quality is pinned to.  Especially since
>some (or all?) of their employers ship or shipped commercial products
>that use it.

The position statement claims:

  A second alternative would be the reference, as a baseline, of older 
  media compression standards, of which one can be reasonably sure that 
  related patents are expired (or are close to expiration). One example 
  for these codecs is ITU-T Rec. H.261, which (in its first version) was
ratified in November 1988. While not competitive with today’s state of
the art codecs, it’s in the author’s personal experience not that far 
  in its performance from Ogg Theora (this technology is what the 
  current HTML5 draft suggests for the same purpose).

The comparison to Theora seemed fairly crazy to me, so I finally made a
few experiments with ffmpeg's H.261 implementation. It is much better
than `1988` suggests. I am not a fan, but answering the straw poll with
"no" to H.261 requires more evidence than I have seen so far.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[e-mail] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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