The codec war is raging now more than ever before. The increased popularity of the proposed WebRTC protocol and the implied royalty costs make this a hot topic. Google, Cisco, Microsoft and now finally Apple are promoting their preferred technology and attempting to influence the choice to be made for WebRTC. The choice is far from clear especially in light of the latest technology advances, the transcoding infrastructure costs involved and the impact on mobile devices. In this session, Weemo will share its multi-year experience developing on top of the leading video and voice codecs. The speaker will provide some perspective on the advantages of each across devices taking into account hardware and software based video acceleration and the impact each have on the end user.

1. WebRTC and the Codec War
Prepared for WebRTC Summit
Wednesday, November 6th
Soufiane Houri
houri@weemo.com
@houri
VP of Product
Weemo, Inc.
@weemo
slideshare.net/weemo

2. Agenda
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
Real-Time Voice and Video Codecs
Codecs proposed for WebRTC today
Top of mind issues in the industry
Tipping the scale
Video codec future
Experience and prediction
References

3. Opus
H.264
G.729
Vorbis
G.711
H.263
Theora
Speex
VP8
G.722
VP7
H.261

4. Opus
H.264
G.729
Vorbis
G.711
H.263
Theora
Speex
VP8
G.722
VP7
H.261

5. Top of mind issues







Bandwidth consumption, Video quality, CPU load
Hardware acceleration
Low level API control
Interoperability, Transcoding
Licensed or open and royalty free
Open Source libraries and proprietary binaries
Mandatory to Implement (MTI) codecs

6. Tipping the scale
Not actively implementing WebRTC
in their browsers today!
VP8
H.264

7. "We continue to believe that open platforms should
encourage open and royalty free technology. There is
strong industry momentum behind the open, royalty free
VP8 video format.
We hope that the IETF community will come together in
voting against royalty encumbered technology as they
slow down the pace of innovation on the web and on the
internet.”
Google spokesperson
October 2013

8. Looking to the future
Opus
H.265/HEVC
VP9
Daala

9. Experience and Prediction
 From Theora/VP4 & H.263 to VP8 & H.264
 Libraries: libvpx and x264
 The industry should set its sights on VP9 and find a way to pave a
royalty free path for H.265/HEVC.
 Minimum of 30 – 40% improvement
 Hardware acceleration is only a minor issue today on mobile
devices but soon it will be a moot point.
For WebRTC to gain adoption by Apple and Microsoft, Google needs to
support H.264 and hope that VP8/9 will equally be accepted.

10. Helpful Links
 H.264 as Mandatory to Implement Video Codec for WebRTC
 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-burman-rtcweb-h264-proposal03
 Updated: October 22, 2013
 VP8 as RTCWEB Mandatory to Implement
 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-alvestrand-rtcweb-vp8-02
 Updated: October 6, 2013
 WebRTC Audio Codec and Processing Requirements
 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-audio-03
 Updated: October 15, 2013