Microsoft Releases A Demo Of Its Own Web Audio / Video Chat Standard

By | January 18, 2013


Microsoft Releases A Demo Of Its Own Web Audio / Video Chat StandardOver the WebRTC, which doesn’t seem to be standardized.

Back in 2012, WebRTC, Google’s proposed web standard for audio, video chat and P2P file transfers, has gained a wide acceptance among various web browser vendors, including: Firefox, Opera, Maxthon and Google Chrome. While Apple is yet to implement and comment on WebRTC, Microsoft did raise some concerns and suggested their own web standard. That was back in August.

Now, the software giant has revealed a demo of its implementation of the CU-RTC-Web proposal, which (surprisingly) looks promising.

Cutting back to the chase, here is one major difference between WebRTC and CU-RTC-Web:

With WebRTC, you can’t chat between two different web browsers, meaning that if you call via Firefox, I will have to download it as well, while Microsoft has demonstrated how their own standard allowed chatting between Google Chrome (running on Mac OS X) and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8.

According to Microsoft, the feedback from working group members was fairly positive, with only downside being a “too radically different from the existing approach, which many believed to be almost ready for formal standardization”.

For even more details (especially when it comes to technical side), check the following post.

[Via: Neowin]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (5)

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  1. Przemysław Lib says:

    Problems with interoperability are temporal for WebRTC for Firefox and Chrome.

    It simply take time to write software properly.

    While MS demo prove nothing as SAME development team create both parts. So Google implementation could still had same problems with communication with MS…

    But at least its fight within IETF and W3C. That is good and it may result in superior standard (as happened with touch standard proposed by MS), even if MS use it as usual for some purely PR’ed claims.

  2. Honestly I think both standards should be pushed.

    In comparison this is like the Web Audio API vs. HTML5 Audio.

    Googles standard is like the HTML5 Audio of video chat while Microsofts is more like the Web Audio API. So I’m sure the two can coexist.

    • Przemysław Lib says:

      Right now WebRTC do not mandate specific codecs (Google push for VP8 and Opus). And its more lice Browser2Browser (WebRTC) vs Browser2Anything (CU-RTC-Web).

      It seam that WebRTC would be DONE if only SDP was good enough. As its now, SDP (or rather IETF group that maintain it) it need to adopt few extensions.

  3. Yeah, your article is misleading. It’s not a feature of WebRTC that implementations don’t yet work cross browser (that would not be much of a standard!). Please fix that.