Chrome 29
Chrome 29 was officially released to the stable channel. The WebRTC related bug fixes and new features are described in this mailing list post. Chrome 29 for Android now supports WebRTC out of the box.
IETF Berlin
The RTCWeb participants met at IETF 87 in Berlin. One of the big decisions was that WebRTC “MUST NOT use SDES” for key exchange. As described in this blog post, SDES is not very secure since:
SDES uses the signaling channel to send the media encryption keys from one end of the connection to the other. This would necessarily allow the web site to access the encryption keys.
VP8 Patent
Several months ago Nokia filed a lawsuit in Germany against HTC over its VP8-compatible Android devices. Google assisted in the defense of HTC and now the German court has ruled that VP8 does not infringe on a patent owned by Nokia.
Chromecast
Google launched the Chromecast, an HDMI dongle that lets you display tabs from Chrome on your laptop or mobile device on a TV. Assuming the performance is good enough, this sounds like a simple and cheap way to put a WebRTC call on a big screen.
WebRTC Book Second Edition
WebRTC: APIs and RTCWEB Protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web is a book dedicated entirely to WebRTC and is now available in a second edition that covers ICE, STUN, and TURN. The book is available both digitally and in paperback.
WebRTC Hacks Blog
Chad Hart, Director of Product Marketing at Acme Packet, teamed up with Reid Steidholph and Victor Pascual Ávila to create the WebRTC Hacks blog. In their words, it is a blog that
puts a developer audience first
and
helps developers move the WebRTC market forward
WebRTC Book
Ilya Grigorik, Developer Advocate at Google, is in the process of writing a book titled High Performance Browser Networking. A preview of the book is available and it has an entire chapter dedicated to WebRTC, complete with examples and diagrams.
IETF – Unified Plan
RTCWeb IETF working group members came to a compromise on a “Unified Plan for SDP Handling”; the authors include representatives from Mozilla, Google and Microsoft.
Chrome 28
Chrome 28 was officially released to the stable channel. The WebRTC-related changes are available in this post to the discuss-webrtc mailing list.
Intel WebRTC
Intel launched a service called “Intel Collaboration Service for WebRTC”, which currently consists of a JavaScript and Android API. Tsahi Levent-Levi speculates that this might result in chipset-level WebRTC support on Intel processors.
MediaStream Recording
Progress is being made on the MediaStream Recording implementation. Support for audio recording landed in Firefox Nightly with progress being tracked in this Bugzilla bug. The Chrome (Blink) team published an “Intent to Implement” document for recording on the blink-dev mailing list and is discussing how best to implement it.
VP9 in Chrome Dev Channel
VP9, the next-generation video codec and successor to VP8, is now enabled by default in the Chrome Dev channel.
IETF Draft for TURN Credentials
A new IETF draft for requesting time-limited TURN credentials for WebRTC apps was uploaded by Justin Uberti, Tech Lead for WebRTC at Google.
Gestures + Reveal.JS
A fun Chrome Experiment combining Reveal.JS, an HTML presentation framework, and webcam-based gestures was circulating on Twitter: herokuapp.com. The source code is available to fork on GitHub.
One of the toughest decisions you have to make as a startup is how much time and effort to spend building your product vs. promoting it. For most of the last two years, we decided to remain laser focused on the building side of things.
As a result, when we showed up at the WebRTC Expo in Atlanta last week, a lot of people in the WebRTC community hadn’t heard of us. That made it all the more rewarding to leave the conference with both the Audience Choice Award, which was awarded based on voting from conference participants, and the Best Conferencing Award, which was awarded by a panel of judges to the best multi-party conferencing solution.
If you missed the conference, you can check us out in the following videos (courtesy of TMCNet):
And thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth and snagged a #webrtcisready t-shirt. We met a lot of great folks and look forward to continuing all those conversations.
WebRTC Conference Atlanta
This past week was the WebRTC Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Vendors, customers, and people interested in learning about WebRTC gathered for three days of presentations, discussion, interviews, and demos (day one and day two). On the last day of the conference, judges handed out awards in several categories.
Some of the attendees wrote up summaries of the expo from their perspectives. Chris Koehncke, Director of Business Development at Genband, is convinced that WebRTC is not just another “feature”:
WebRTC is a difficult concept for the average programmer to wrap their head around and we, as the industry pundits, need to work to work on this. It’s not time to sell, it’s time to educate.
Tsahi Levent-Levi, one of the moderators for the WebRTC panel called “The Hype Cycle”, wrote about his thoughts on the conference and came to the conclusion that WebRTC is ready because
There were real products with real end customers using it already, which to me is a validation of the need
WebKit
The WebKit development mailing list had a post from Danilo Cesar, Software Engineer at Collabora, where he mentioned that
A few colleagues and I are working on the getUserMedia/PeerConnection API for the Gtk port.
KDE Core Developer and Senior Software Developer at Digia, Allan Jensen, replied later in the thread with
I know of a company working on WebRTC for QtWebKit. They want to upstream it, but I do not know the current status or timeline.
WebRTC Overview and Tutorial
Cullen Jennings, RTCWeb co-chair, gave a nice WebRTC overview and tutorial at INET Bangkok. A video of the presentation has been posted. It’s about 80 minutes and gives both a general overview of WebRTC, as well going into some of the technical details.
Skype Architecture
In response to a mailing list post, Principal Skype Architect Matthew Kaufman, went into some of the reasons that Skype transitioned from a peer-to-peer model to a server-based “dedicated supernode” model. One reason for the switch was the unreliability of the supernodes, which were primarily Windows machines:
This proved to be a problem when not once, but twice a global Skype network outage was caused by a crashing bug in that client… bootstrapping the network back into existence afterwards was painful and lengthy
The other issue highlighted was the increasing prevalence of mobile devices:
The Skype peer-to-peer network, and many of its functions (such as instant messaging) was built for a world where almost every machine is powered by a wall socket, plugged into broadband Internet, and on for many hours a day.
VP9 in Chromium
Support for the VP9 codec, the successor to VP8, was enabled by default in Chromium. It’s not yet available to use as a WebRTC codec, but we can’t imagine that it will be too long before it is.
Mozilla
Mozilla announced their “Talkilla” project (source on GitHub), which will
… allow users to communicate in real time as they browse the web, and offer tools to share their online experience. Additional Service Providers will be expose their services, for example, dialing out and receiving calls from the telephone network.
Also, Mozilla is requesting help testing Firefox’s WebRTC implementation this Friday (June 21):
We would like for you to use the new version of Firefox on your Android phone and desktop or laptop machine, and take a close look at the latest Nightly builds in order to assist us in identifying any noticeably major issues found with our WebRTC implementation, and ensure that all feature functionality that is included in this upcoming release is on its way to a feature and testing complete state.
CubeSlam
Google launched a fun Pong clone called “CubeSlam” that utilizes the WebRTC data channel. Try it out at cubeslam.com and check out the source code on Google Code.
WebRTC Conference and Expo
We’ll be in Atlanta next week for the WebRTC Conference and Expo. Be sure to drop by and say hello at our booth (#81). We have one free pass to the conference available, so the first person to send us a note at [email protected] will get it!