Re: [rtcweb] ~"I'd love it if patents evaporated...If not now, when"

["Matthew Kaufman (SKYPE)" <[e-mail]>]

Chatroulette (the top trending search term for 2010 and featured on The Daily Show) used Flash and RTMFP to do peer-to-peer video chat. The original Tokbox and their original API was also based on Flash with RTMFP for P2P communications. I'm sure there's others.

Matthew Kaufman

From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of cowwoc
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 9:21 PM
To: Michael Thornburgh
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [rtcweb] ~"I'd love it if patents evaporated...If not now, when"


Really? I've never seen a single P2P video chat app in Flash. What specifically does "P2P for real time communication" actually mean?

Gili

On 13/11/2013 6:32 PM, Michael Thornburgh wrote:
> The real revolution is P2P: massive cost savings, ease of deployment and most importantly: cutting out the middle man. The status quo (H.264 over Flash) does not do this.

note: Flash has had P2P for real time communication since 2009.

-michael thornburgh

From: [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]> [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of cowwoc
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2013 2:32 PM
To: Kaiduan Xie
Cc: [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: [rtcweb] ~"I'd love it if patents evaporated...If not now, when"


I agree. I'm just pointing out that John's argument (quoted below) doesn't make any sense. Choosing "no MTI" doesn't make Cisco any more likely to implement VP8.

If we choose "No MTI" we will end up with transcoding, plain and simple. One crowd will only implement H.264. The other crowd will only implement VP8. All the useless middlemen will rejoice, having killed a technology that puts them out of business.

Providing "video chat without a plugin" is not revolutionary. Flash is already installed on 95% of the market. That's more people than WebRTC can reach today, so we're not "liberating" those people from anything.

The real revolution is P2P: massive cost savings, ease of deployment and most importantly: cutting out the middle man. The status quo (H.264 over Flash) does not do this.

P2P cannot work unless 95% of clients can agree on a common codec. I say again: start with H.261 and upgrade to VP8 or H.264. This way everyone can be happy:

  *   The VP8 crowd can use VP8
  *   The H264 crowd can use H264
  *   The enterprise crowd can transcode
  *   If all of the above fails, we can fallback on H.261.

Yes, this carries the burden of implementing H.261 but this is a solved-problem. There are plenty of free implementations and is a much easier problem to solve than getting the H.264 and VP8 crowd to agree to implement each other's codec.

Start with H.261 and replace it the moment you find something better. Forcing us to transcode or drop video calls is not a solution.

Gili
On 13/11/2013 4:57 PM, Kaiduan Xie wrote:
"if an implementer gets sued they can simply drop the codec"

Thing is not that simple as "simply drop the codec", for some case you still have to pay a lot of money.

/Kaiduan

On 13/11/2013 11:55 AM, John Leslie wrote:
    And I claim that both camps are actually more likely to implement
(or allow extensions for) the other side's codec if it is _not_ MTI,
simply because they can back out at the first sign of lawyers.