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• WebRTC predictions for 2016

  17 février 2016, par silvia

  I wrote these predictions in the first week of January and meant to publish them as encouragement to think about where WebRTC still needs some work. I’d like to be able to compare the state of WebRTC in the browser a year from now. Therefore, without further ado, here are my thoughts.

  WebRTC Browser support

  I’m quite optimistic when it comes to browser support for WebRTC. We have seen Edge bring in initial support last year and Apple looking to hire engineers to implement WebRTC. My prediction is that we will see the following developments in 2016 :

  • Edge will become interoperable with Chrome and Firefox, i.e. it will publish VP8/VP9 and H.264/H.265 support
  • Firefox of course continues to support both VP8/VP9 and H.264/H.265
  • Chrome will follow the spec and implement H.264/H.265 support (to add to their already existing VP8/VP9 support)
  • Safari will enter the WebRTC space but only with H.264/H.265 support

  Codec Observations

  With Edge and Safari entering the WebRTC space, there will be a larger focus on H.264/H.265. It will help with creating interoperability between the browsers.

  However, since there are so many flavours of H.264/H.265, I expect that when different browsers are used at different endpoints, we will get poor quality video calls because of having to negotiate a common denominator. Certainly, baseline will work interoperably, but better encoding quality and lower bandwidth will only be achieved if all endpoints use the same browser.

  Thus, we will get to the funny situation where we buy ourselves interoperability at the cost of video quality and bandwidth. I’d call that a “degree of interoperability” and not the best possible outcome.

  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at this stage, Google is going to consider strongly to improve the case of VP8/VP9 by improving its bandwidth adaptability : I think they will buy themselves some SVC capability and make VP9 the best quality codec for live video conferencing. Thus, when Safari eventually follows the standard and also implements VP8/VP9 support, the interoperability win of H.264/H.265 will become only temporary overshadowed by a vastly better video quality when using VP9.

  The Enterprise Boundary

  Like all video conferencing technology, WebRTC is having a hard time dealing with the corporate boundary : firewalls and proxies get in the way of setting up video connections from within an enterprise to people outside.

  The telco world has come up with the concept of SBCs (session border controller). SBCs come packed with functionality to deal with security, signalling protocol translation, Quality of Service policing, regulatory requirements, statistics, billing, and even media service like transcoding.

  SBCs are a total overkill for a world where a large number of Web applications simply want to add a WebRTC feature – probably mostly to provide a video or audio customer support service, but it could be a live training session with call-in, or an interest group conference all.

  We cannot install a custom SBC solution for every WebRTC service provider in every enterprise. That’s like saying we need a custom Web proxy for every Web server. It doesn’t scale.

  Cloud services thrive on their ability to sell directly to an individual in an organisation on their credit card without that individual having to ask their IT department to put special rules in place. WebRTC will not make progress in the corporate environment unless this is fixed.

  We need a solution that allows all WebRTC services to get through an enterprise firewall and enterprise proxy. I think the WebRTC standards have done pretty well with firewalls and connecting to a TURN server on port 443 will do the trick most of the time. But enterprise proxies are the next frontier.

  What it takes is some kind of media packet forwarding service that sits on the firewall or in a proxy and allows WebRTC media packets through – maybe with some configuration that is necessary in the browsers or the Web app to add this service as another type of TURN server.

  I don’t have a full understanding of the problems involved, but I think such a solution is vital before WebRTC can go mainstream. I expect that this year we will see some clever people coming up with a solution for this and a new type of product will be born and rolled out to enterprises around the world.

  Summary

  So these are my predictions. In summary, they address the key areas where I think WebRTC still has to make progress : interoperability between browsers, video quality at low bitrates, and the enterprise boundary. I’m really curious to see where we stand with these a year from now.

  —

  It’s worth mentioning Philipp Hancke’s tweet reply to my post :

  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-rtcweb-return/ … — we saw some clever people come up with a solution already. Now it needs to be implemented

• Skipping silent parts of video with ffplay

  3 février 2021, par handy

  so I saw that I can cut the silent parts of an audio file. Is it possible to play a video file with ffplay and make it auto skip the silent parts using those audio filters ?

  


  Like using e.g. https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#silenceremove on the audio stream and then tell ffplay "skip the video where the silenceremove filter detects silence".

  


  I know that there are cases where the video might change in silence. That does not matter in my case. I know that https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor could help me in any such edge case since it implements motion detection but I want to skip the generation of a new video file since it just takes too much ressources.

  


• How can I programmatically write and read random video watermarks ?

  13 novembre 2017, par GreenTriangle

  I spent a few minutes trying to think of a clearer way to word my title, but I couldn’t manage it, sorry.

  I want to essentially canary trap video files : I am (hypothetically, this is not real but a personal exercise) offering them up to 5,000 different people, and if one gets leaked, I want to know who leaked it. Metadata is too easily emoved, so what I’d like to do is add a random and subtle watermark to each file, and store information about that in a database.

  For example : on Joe Smith’s copy, a 10x10 pixel 80% transparent red square in the upper left corner for 5 frames. On Diane Brown’s copy, a full-width 5-pixel 90% transparent black bar on the bottom edge for 15 frames. Then, if I find a leaked copy, I could check it against the database.

  I know this still isn’t foolproof : cropping would break co-ordinates, hue/brightness transforms would break colour reading, cutting time would break timestamps. But if I did want to do this anyway, what would be a good strategy for it ?

  My idea was to generate PNG overlays randomly, split the video into parts with mkvtoolnix/ffmpeg, re-encode the middle part with ffmpeg + overlay filter, and then rejoin them. But is this silly when there’s a "proper" way to do it ? And what would I be doing to read the watermarks, which I can’t even really conceive of ?