Microsoft, Google, others Co-Author Real-Time Communications Specification

dmahugh · on Aug 29, 2014

You can find discussion of various aspects of ORTC's design on the public mailing list archive for the ORTC community group here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ortc/. In addition to using JavaScript rather than a legacy format to configure the real-time protocols, ORTC addresses some useful real-world scenarios such as mixing and matching data connections.

walterbell · on Aug 28, 2014

Is this interoperable with WebRTC nodes, or is it a fork?

McGlockenshire · on Aug 28, 2014

It's my understanding that ORTC was originally proposed by Microsoft as an alternative to WebRTC.

I've never been able to track down what MS thinks was actually wrong enough with WebRTC that required an alternate proposal.

walterbell · on Aug 28, 2014

Found some background at http://ortc.org/History/ & http://blog.webrtc.is/2013/03/06/sdp-the-webrtc-boat-anchor/

"My issues with SDP can be summarized as:

- unneeded – much too high level an API

- arcane format – legacy and problematic

- offer/answer

- incompatibilities

- lack of API contact

- doesn’t truly solve goal of interoperability with legacy systems (eg. SIP)"

from

"the Chief Architect at Hookflash and author of the new P2P protocol, Open Peer. I used to be the CTO/ Chief Scientist at Xten, now CounterPath, and I’m the original author of the X-Lite/X-PRO/eyeBeam SIP softphone clients. "

tommoor · on Aug 28, 2014

As someone that has spent the last 18months building on WebRTC I can agree with all of Microsofts points - particularly offer/answer state machine which is hugely problematic.

higherpurpose · on Aug 28, 2014

I don't know about the other stuff, but Microsoft hated having to use the VP8 codec instead of h.264 (even though it adopted it later on in Skype).

higherpurpose · on Aug 28, 2014

If they went through the trouble of overhauling WebRTC, did they at least add better end-to-end security to it?