[Asterisk-video] theora

[Mihai Balea]

On Jan 28, 2011, at 12:25 PM, Maris wrote:
> 
> I think that h.263 is primarily focused on videoconferencing, and I encounter no obeyable realtime drawback when I'm testing with theora. Its main advantage is smooth image movements rendering when bandwidth is limited (contrary to h.263, tested with linphone client, peer2peer). I mention h.263 because many clients support it, as well as theora is also supported by many clients (linphone, ekiga, ...).

H.263 is old technology, Theora should be significantly superior. However, compared to the current generation of codecs (H.264, WebM), Theora is a bit behind in image quality and lacks the realtime features I was mentioning in my previous email.


> OK, but that does not hinder to implement a fairly simple(?) feedthrough of popular codecs. It is regrettable that your patch didn't get the finishing touch, where I believe that the core team had been able to help with this - and was unmotivated due to limited bit field resources.

Yes, the asterisk patch was very simple, since asterisk does not need to be aware of codec internals to forward bits from one side to another. If I remember correctly, the patch just added the minimum necessary to successfully negotiate Theora video.

>> Unfortunately, at the time, Theora was the only license free video codec available, so we had to go with it. Nowadays, you also have WebM - it
> 
> ... and P8K, for example. Well, in both cases, limited client support - today.

I am not familiar with P8K. The only other free video codec I know is Dirac.
However, I suspect WebM will gain more traction, due to Google backing it. Plus, it's pretty good, as far as I can tell.

Mihai
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