Re: [rtcweb] Stephan Wenger's choices

[Ron <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 11:20:28AM -0800, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> 
> Even if we mandate H.261, there is a reasonable chance of their
> expectations being thwarted, since they might well expect that
> the quality of video would be comparable, yet it will not.

You don't get much more thwarted than "no video for you", the only
direction from there is up.  Given a device with a ~4 inch screen,
viewed from a foot or two away, possibly in open daylight, maybe
even while bouncing around on a bus or train or while walking,
maybe with a bunch of scratches on the screen or a plastic cover,
there's a fair bet that a significant percentage of viewers wouldn't
be able to pick the difference between it and a perfectly lossless
image stream anyway.

Is it going to be worse than NTSC television?  How many people were
happy enough to keep buying and watching those?  How many still
would if it was all that they could get?


Sure it might not look optimal on your studio monitor, or your floor
to ceiling boardroom conference screen, or to eyes that have spent
years picking out visual artifacts from lossy codecs.  But we're not
ruling out those people being able to use state of the art codecs
that have no hope at all of running on minimal devices.  We're looking
for a baseline that poses the minimal challenge to everything being
able to support it, for the broadest scope of interoperability.

Things that can will always negotiate up from that.  What is the
technical reason for setting the lowest bar so high that many of the
supposed target devices will never be able to reach it?  There would
seem to be few real barriers to making a more inclusive choice here,
so why don't we just do that and move on?

  Ron