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.