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All posts by Tim Panton

webrtcH4cKS: ~ What I learned about H.264 for WebRTC video (Tim Panton)

Posted by Tim Panton on January 29, 2019
Posted in: Technology.
Tagged: , , .
12 comments

It has been a few years since the WebRTC codec wars ended in a detente. H.264 has been around for more than 15 years so it is easy to gloss over the the many intricacies that make it work.

Reknown hackathon star, live-coder, and |pipe| CTO Tim Panton was working on a drone project where he needed a light-weight H.264 stack for WebRTC, so he decided to build one. This is certainly not an exercise I would recommend for most, but Tim shows it can be an enlightening experience if not an easy one. In this post, Tim walks us through his step-by-step discovery as he just tries to get video to work. Check it out for an enjoyable alternative to reading through RFCs specs for an intro on H.264! ...  Continue reading

webrtcH4cKS: ~ SDP: The worst of all worlds or why compromise can be a bad idea (Tim Panton)

Posted by Tim Panton on January 20, 2014
Posted in: Standards.
Tagged: , , , , .
3 comments

As WebRTC implementations and field trials evolve, field experience is telling us there are still a number of open issues to make this technology deployable in the real world and the fact that we would probably do some things differently if we started all over again. As an example, see the recent W3C discussion What is missing for building (WebRTC) real services or Quobis‘ CTO post on WebRTC use of SDP.

Tim Panton, contextual communications consultant at Westhawk Ltd,  has gone through some of these issues. During the last couple of years we had the chance to run some workshops together and have some good discussions in the IETF and W3C context. Tim’s expertise is very valuable and I thought it would be a good idea to have him here to share some of his experiences with our readers. It ended up as a rant. ...  Continue reading