Re: [rtcweb] Congratuiations on the Cisco announcement - but we still prefer VP8

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 10/31/13 13:47, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>
> We congratulate Cisco on their intention to make an open source H.264 
> codec available and usable by the community. We look forward to seeing 
> the result of this effort.
>
>
> Google still believes that VP8 - a freely available, fully open, 
> high-quality video codec that you can download, compile for your 
> platform, include in your binary, distribute and put into production 
> today - is the best choice of a Mandatory to Implement video codec for 
> the WebRTC effort.
>

I agree with Harald that VP8 is a better codec than H.264 baseline in a 
number of important ways.

But I also want to reiterate that having an MTI codec has never been 
about choosing the best codec or even a good codec. It's about choosing 
an emergency backup codec-of-last-resort. It's about having one single 
mandated codec that everyone has in their back pocket in case nothing 
else works.

The core of RTCWEB is about session *negotiation*. Endpoints will 
negotiate the best codec they have in common. Once the next generation 
of codecs come out, this "best codec in common" will only be the MTI if 
they were about to fail anyway.

So it doesn't have to be good.

It just has to be better than failure.

/a