Re: [rtcweb] Alternative decision process in RTCWeb

[cowwoc <[e-mail]>]

On 02/12/2013 9:00 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> I think it is highly relevant whether the mandatory-to-implement codec 
> supports two people in typical German households communicate via video 
> in sign language, and how it does so relative to non-mandatory 
> options, as a simple example. If H.264 supports the scenario and H.261 
> does not, then selecting H.261 does not in fact prevent the absolute 
> worst case and does not ensure that communication via video can always 
> happen. 

Bjoern,

I'd like to point you to http://www.netindex.com/upload/allcountries/ 
for two reasons:

 1. It states that Germany has an average upload rate of 3.13Mbps.
 2. It shows that upload speeds are increasing over time.

>> The fight against H.261 as MTI is really not about quality or
>> efficiency, but rather, about forcing a royalty-bearing format on what
>> should be an open standard and to save a few big players some
>> implementation dollars because they might want to reuse some existing
>> hardware, all of which are secondary points in this charter compared to
>> a universally applicable MTI video codec.
> Like I said, I have not seen a convincing argument that H.261 performs
> well enough, and the implementation techniques that can reasonably be
> assumed to be unencumbered are old enough that I think it is fair to
> assume without investigating myself that selecting H.261 as only manda-
> tory-to-implement video codec could work on paper, but not in practise.
>
> I read the "irrelevant" responses as essentially advocating that we may
> just as well make sending raw and unencoded RGB data the MTI codec. I'm
> more than willing to hear better arguments. The same goes for the H.263
> option that has been suggested.

H.261 is meant as a fallback only in the case that the market cannot 
agree to upgrade to VP8 or H.264 at runtime. If a sizable portion of the 
market cannot agree at runtime, what makes you believe that that same 
sizable portion can agree on a MTI codec? And a final question, in case 
you disagree with everything I've written so far: How do you advocate we 
proceed in light of the fact that we already tried to (and failed) to 
reach consensus around VP8 and H.264?

Gili