Re: [rtcweb] revisiting MTI

[Roman Shpount <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 2:56 PM, DRAGE, Keith (Keith) <
[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>  Forget it.
>
> You are making an attempt to reduce the entire issue to IPR, and the
> discussion prior to the last meeting had been wider that that, including
> issues of interoperability with endpoints outside webRTC.
>
> As far as I am concerned an IPR free codec is irrelevant if I cannot talk
> to the endpoints I need to, and just concentrating on the webrtc community
> as the available endpoint may meet some deployers use cases, but not others.
>

There is no such thing as IPR free codec, unless you are talking about
H.261 or MJPEG where IPR has expired. What we are looking for is a video
codec with an acceptable quality (both VP8 and H.264 qualify) and
reasonable licensing (both VP8 and H.264 have serious issues here). If it
is confirmed the VP8 licensing issues are resolved (i.e. it went through
the standardization process, all IPR declaration against it which prevent
licensing are confirmed to not apply in court or due to some sort of
licencing agreement), then VP8 is clearly superior. If H.264 fixes its
licensing (i.e. present a clear, published, no royalty licensing terms with
no use restrictions), it can be a superior codec. Legacy interop support is
important, but to me at least, it is secondary to unrestricted use. Please
see Opus vs AMR-WB+ for clear similarities.

Also, VP9 or H.265 would clearly  improve video quality, but both VP8 and
H.264 with the current connection speeds allow for the highly usable video
communications. I think that quality wise, either one of VP8 and H.264 can
serve as usable MTI for a lot longer then the next two years or whatever
time is required for the next great video codec to be developed. Especially
in another 5-6 years when all the IPR on these codecs will expire.
_____________
Roman Shpount