Cisco To Open Source H.264, Surveillance Impact?

From personal experience, this was the first major hurdle. There are certainly others, but having a way to decode the video in the web browser was always the biggest.

Why spend engineering resources on developing the features and the interface in the thin client when it will always lag behind the thick client in video performance. If you take a look at two of the big ones, Exacq and Milestone, they transcode before they send the video. That means a much greater CPU load compared to using a thick client.

Now with that out of the way, they can spend resources to over come the other hurdles, which are not nearly as big.

This is all assuming WebRTC adopts this and gets implemented in all the browsers.

John,

Streaming H.264 to the web requires paying royalties and obtaining licenses from MPEG. Hence why Cisco is doing this. It's the reason the WebM project was started in 2010. As a solution around such restrictive stupidity for something as open as the web. The point of my comment was to illustrate that there are already good solutions available even without Cisco doing what they're doing.

As an aside, I'm not the only one who believes WebM is a good choice. In a discussion on your own multi-streaming comparison thread, Murat Altuev, founder and Director of Axxonsoft even acknowledged that it was a good choice.

The web should be open and those who use it to provide solutions to web users shouldn't be restricted by stupid licensing schemes. Addtionally, H.264 has serious issues in standard web streaming (that's a whole other discussion). With WebM the decoder lives within the construct of the stream therefore it doesn't require silly extensions or add-ons for proper decoding. The only other alternative around MPEG's monopoly on H.264 is to stick with MJPG as many other VMS do. We believe WebM and open-licensed open source is the way to go.

As an aside, it's worth taking a look at who the supporters of the WebM project are: http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/

We're talking in circles James so I'll just leave it with all my comments below. Even in the comments of the Cisco thread listed above the discussion of their solution vs. WebM - VP8/9 codec is lively.

WebM for IE is not an extension. I shouldn't have used that word. WebM for IE. It is simply an additional capability that allows IE to "open the window" and allow VP8/9 to pass through. It is not a decoding engine.

Regarding Apple, Cisco's blog openly discusses that right now it is only for the open source Firefox browswer so it will do you no more good than WebM would for Safari. And for the record, Firefox threw their support behind WebM two years ago and has been a major part of its open source evolution which is why Firefox has full support for it for over two years.

We are transcoding for the reasons I describe in my comments below. It allows dynamic resolution scaling which has huge benefit in optimizing for varying bandwidth connections.

And lastly, as I discuss below, Cisco's own PR person has acknowledged that commercial applications of their technology are still bound by the MPEG-LA royalty licensing once the distribution reaches greater than 100,000 installs with the limitless cap still requiring the $6,500,000 royalty license.

To me this whole thing sounds like Cisco's attempt to stay relevant in a web space that is rapidly trending towards open source, open standards, open licensing. I'd recommend reading all of the comments on that blog post as well. They are highly enlightening regarding the limitations of what they are doing.