Chrome and Firefox demonstrate plug-in-free video chat

Developers at Google and Mozilla have demonstrated interoperability between their implementations of WebRTC, allowing them to make video calls without plug-ins. WebRTC is being developed within the W3C and IETF communities as a future standard for HTML5-capable browsers to allow them to create HD video quality connections, between servers and browsers or between browser peers, without resorting to third-party or non-standard plugins. Two different web browsers being able to communicate using WebRTC is a significant milestone in that standard's development. Using the current Chrome 25 Beta and a recent Firefox Nightly, Todd Simpson, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer and Hugh Finnan, Google's Director of Product Management were able to video chat from their respective browsers.

A demonstration of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox interoperating on video chat with WebRTC

The connection was managed by a Google App-Engine implementation of AppRTC (available as source in the WebRTC samples). The browsers both use the Opus and VP8 codecs for audio and video and ICE for the networking connection. Mozilla gives further details of how the RTCPeerConnection can be created using only JavaScript and how to configure your own interop demonstrations of the browser.

Google introduced the WebRTC framework in June 2011 and began integrating it into Chrome in January 2012. In April 2012, Mozilla showed its first WebRTC integration at the IETF and, the following July, Google proposed VP8 and Opus as the standard codecs for WebRTC to ensure a baseline of interoperability.

(djwm)