Re: [rtcweb] Platforms that support H264 (was: Congratuiations on the Cisco announcement - but we still prefer VP8)

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Emil Ivov <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I'd encourage you to read back.
>
> This part of the thread started with the claim that most of the time it
> won't come to downloading Cisco's binary because there is already
> widespread OS support for H.264 encoding on all OSes
>

I assume you're referring to Bernard's comment? If so, I don't think that's
actually
what he said.

In any case, speaking as someone who actually has to deal with this, it's
more
work to maintain more code paths. Thus, I anticipate using Cisco's binary on
all desktop platforms and only using platform codecs where it offers a
significant
performance advantage, e.g., on mobile.

On a related note: it's a mistake to assume that just because there aren't
currently good interfaces to the existing H.264 encoding hardware that those
interfaces will never exist. For instance, the iPhone clearly has real-time
capable encoding hardware, and Apple certainly could make it available
if they wanted. That's a much simpler proposition than adding hardware
where none exists.

-Ekr