In relayed sessions, clients send streamsĭirectly to one another, and each publishing-subscribing pair tries to find a common video codec The OpenTok Media Router), the preferred video codec is used for all clients in the session. You can set the preferred video codec for a project on the Project page of Setting the preferred video codec for a project H.264 is not well suited to large sessions since it does not support the OpenTok Scalable Video feature. As such, H.264 may not perform as well at lower bit-rates when compared to VP8. Given that H.264 is a new codec for WebRTC and each device may have a different implementation, the quality can vary. The number of hardware instances is device-dependent with iOS having the best support. Hardware codec support means that the core CPU of the device doesn’t have to work as hard to process the video, resulting in reduced CPU load. It is a relatively new codec in the context of WebRTC although it has a long history for streaming movies and video clips over the internet.
The H.264 real-time video codec is available in both hardware and software forms depending on the device. The VP8 codec supports the OpenTok Scalableįeature, which means it works well in large sessions with supported browsers and devices. As a software codec it can be instantiatedĪs many times as is needed by the application within the limits of memory and CPU. Is a mature video codec in the context of WebRTC. The VP8 real-time video codec is a software codec. The mechanism for encoding and decoding the video is the codec standard and for the purpose of this page we are going to talk about two popular ones, VP8 and H.264. It also has the ability to ingest a stream of binary data and decode (decompress) it into a flow of raw video frames that can be displayed on a screen.
It has the ability to encode (compress) incoming digital video frames from a webcam into a stream of binary data that can be sent over a network. What is a video codec?Ī video codec has two parts, an encoder and a decoder.
Depending on the type of application you are building and the types of browsers and devices your end users will use, your choice of preferred codec will change. Some endpoints support both video codecs, and some just support one video codec. You can select which video codec you want to assign as your preferred codec for a particular OpenTok project.Īcross the broad ecosystem of devices and browsers that OpenTok supports there are varying levels of support for the VP8 and H.264 real-time video codecs. In particular the OpenTok platform supports the VP8 and the H.264 video codecs. The H.264 component is a video compression codec and in order to host the video file, it must have a video container.The OpenTok platform leverages the WebRTC protocol and the real-time video codecs that are supported by WebRTC.
The H264 file is frequently misnamed because it is actually an MP4 file in most cases, but many people still call it a H264 file. The developers also did not want the design to be overly complicated, wanted to keep costs at a reasonable level, and wanted the file format to give enough flexibility so that it could be widely used. The purpose of creating the H264 file format was to develop something that would be able to provide a very high quality of video, but with lower bit rates than had been seen in the past. The H264 format is frequently used for AVCHD video recorders, HD DVDs and Blu-ray players. Later editions of the format improved the capabilities of the format. The first release of this type of video file format happened in mid-2003. The format has the ability to do the video recording, but it can also handle the compression and distribution work for the video as well. This type of file format is a video compression format and is one of the more popular formats for videos today, especially high definition videos. The file extension H264 is used when referring to a H.264 Encoded Video File.