Re: [rtcweb] Offer/answer for heterogeneous encode/decode

["Paul Giralt (pgiralt)" <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 22, 2013, at 7:06 PM, Martin Thomson <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 22 November 2013 15:44, Paul Giralt (pgiralt) <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> While you’re right that it would work for this scenario, my point was really
>> that Offer/Answer is not really asymmetric as implied earlier. Take for
>> example the hypothetical case where you are only able to decode VP8 but only
>> able to encode H.264. If I offer VP8 as my only codec (because it’s the only
>> thing I’m able to decode therefore I never want anyone to send me anything
>> other than VP8) I cannot send H.264 in the offer because that implies I’m
>> able to decode it. The other side then wants to say it can only receive
>> H.264 so it would have to send back an answer with only H.264. I guess
>> there’s nothing really inherently stopping you from doing this because as
>> far as I can tell, 3264 only says the answer has to be a subset of the offer
>> for multicast streams, however how would the answering side know that the
>> offering side is even capable to receiving H.264? Perhaps Offer/Answer can
>> technically be asymmetric, but it doesn’t seem practical to use it this way
>> because you cannot really indicate your send and receive capabilities
>> independent of each other.
> 
> Judicious application of a=sendonly or a=recvonly avoids this issue.
> If you want to send H.264, try a=sendonly on a line with H.264.  If
> you want to receive VP8, try a=recvonly on a line with VP8.

I gave this as an example of a possible way to do it, but that means you need two separate m= lines - one for send and one for receive. Seems strange to do this for something that you really want to be a single bi-directional stream. 

-Paul