WebRTC standard will support VP8 and H.264

Thanks to the efforts of people from Mozilla, the WebRTC protocol will support VP8 and H.264 video codecs. This was announced in his blog by the company's chief technologist, Andreas Gal. The WebRTC project is designed to introduce browsers to support streaming data through the peer2peer system, which will make it possible to support, directly in browsers, without additional plug-ins and third-party applications, video communication and file sharing.

The IETF Internet standards working group on the use of audio codecs, RTCWEB, has been agreed for a long time - these will be G.711 and Opus. But disputes over the choice and use of the video codec have been going on for several years. VP8 is a free codec and can be used without any deductions. H.264, on the other hand, is very common and supported by many existing programs (TV shows and movies on the computer you watch with its help), and some hardware.

As a result, Mozilla managed to create a version of the open source codec, OpenH264 , and integrate support for both codecs into the latest browser versions while working with the Cisco codec owner. The rest of the browsers decided to follow their example, and now video support in WebRTC will look like this: all browsers will have to support both codecs, and applications other than browsers that support WebRTC will be able to support only one of them.

Full support for the standard will get rid of proprietary software (read, Skype) and give developers a lot of great new opportunities for creativity. Meanwhile, Microsoft is already testing a version of Skype running just through WebRTC.