Re: [rtcweb] H.261

[Basil Mohamed Gohar <[e-mail]>]

On 11/22/2013 03:44 PM, Stefan Slivinski wrote:
> Thank you for the link.
> 
> The point I'm trying to make is H.261 will harm the proliferation of webrtc far more than it will help.  This is purely a technical argument speaking to quality and error resiliency.
> 
> Has anyone listed the concerns surrounding H.264 and have these been raised with mpeg-la to see if they can make adjustments to the license agreement.  They have certainly done so in the past.

Believe it or not, the MPEG-LA is currently trying to establish a
royalty-free subset of H.264 called "Constrained Baseline Profile",
which is very similar to the most commonly-used subset of H.264 features
out there.

The problem is, it's not done yet, and there's no indication whether or
not it will be successful or not.  This would require all existing
stakeholders in H.264 licensing to agree to this royalty-free variant
for it to matter.

There's another effort to do the same with one using MPEG-1 as a base.

The problem is, none of these formally exist in royalty-free forms as of
yet.  Everything else we've discussed, though, does, including H.261.

And, for what it's worth, I disagree about H.261.  Yes, H.264 and/or VP8
(and a whole list of other codecs) will look *better*, but I think being
able to communicate via video over H.261 is better than not being able
to all.

And we are at a point where "not at all" is going to happen because the
WG is effectively split over using VP8 and H.264.

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Libre Video
http://librevideo.org