AllRadioisDead
August 28th, 2013, 06:03 PM
For video, Google is dropping the proprietary, royalty-encumbered H.264 codec for its own VP8. VP8 was acquired and open sourced (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/04/google-planning-to-open-the-vp8-video-codec/) by Google in 2010 with the purchase of On2 Technologies. The new codec will require much less processing power, which Google says will enable most computers to handle 10 720p video streams at once. It should also enable higher-quality, lower-bit-rate streams across the board. The H.264 plugin will still be supported for browsers that do not support VP8: IE (of course), Safari, and older mobile clients.
The next step for Hangouts is an upgrade to WebRTC, a browser-based video chat standard that was developed and open-sourced by Google. A combination of WebRTC and VP8 would let Hangouts function totally plugin-free in a modern browser. While WebRTC has been around for two years, there are still a few bumps in the road before Hangouts can make use of it. Hangout's current feature set includes silly overlays like hats and sunglasses that use facial recognition to follow the user's head around in real time. There is currently no way to do this in WebRTC, so Google still has some work to do.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/google-hangouts-upgrading-to-hd-video-chat-switching-to-vp8-webrtc/
The next step for Hangouts is an upgrade to WebRTC, a browser-based video chat standard that was developed and open-sourced by Google. A combination of WebRTC and VP8 would let Hangouts function totally plugin-free in a modern browser. While WebRTC has been around for two years, there are still a few bumps in the road before Hangouts can make use of it. Hangout's current feature set includes silly overlays like hats and sunglasses that use facial recognition to follow the user's head around in real time. There is currently no way to do this in WebRTC, so Google still has some work to do.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/google-hangouts-upgrading-to-hd-video-chat-switching-to-vp8-webrtc/