IE to support WebRTC and Opus.

Ashley

You might find this interesting <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_biggrin.gif" alt=":D" title="Very Happy">

http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/27/micro ... -explorer/

TiAm, I am curious, MS said that they are going to support ORTC and I know this is an evolution of WEBRTC is some way that both google and Microsoft support, but I don't know anything more than that.

does anyone know anything more about ORTC and how it impacts on webrtc and C2?

PS: it's nice to see MS spot an issue in an open standard and also nice to see that google was willing to allow the changes be incorporated.

ORTC is basically WebRTC with a slightly different and incompatible API. As I understand it, it should be possible to implement WebRTC in terms of ORTC, since ORTC is actually more customisable. Providing there's a good shim that does that, we should be able to easily support multiplayer with ORTC without even really changing our code. Even if there's no shim we should be able to adapt our code to work with ORTC instead.

tl;dr - if IE supports ORTC then it should be able to support Multiplayer as well. Good news!

What I found equally exciting is that they explicitly say they are planning to support Opus (your #1 request on the recent IE feedback thread). This would mean better audio quality, and one step closer to doing away with dual encoding.

Having experimented with opus quite a bit, I can say it's an incredible codec, especially at lower bitrates. For example: voice can be compressed to a 32kbps stream that is perceptually lossless with most speakers/headphones. It takes at least 2x the bitrate to match this with ogg or mp3. Even as low as 16kbps voice is perfectly intelligible (similar to AM or 32kbps mp3). Surround sound can be encoded at 128kbps. Small audio clips (like SFX) are even smaller because Opus does not require large codebooks like mp3/vorbis.

Now, if only Safari would support it...

ORTC is basically WebRTC with a slightly different and incompatible API. As I understand it, it should be possible to implement WebRTC in terms of ORTC, since ORTC is actually more customisable. Providing there's a good shim that does that, we should be able to easily support multiplayer with ORTC without even really changing our code. Even if there's no shim we should be able to adapt our code to work with ORTC instead.

tl;dr - if IE supports ORTC then it should be able to support Multiplayer as well. Good news!

Asley, are there any updates on ORTC support? No luck getting multiplayer working in IE or Edge, works fine elsewhere.

AFAIK Edge is in the process of implementing ORTC (a WebRTC variant), but has not yet added DataChannel support which the multiplayer engine uses. When they add that, we'll look in to supporting it.

AFAIK Edge is in the process of implementing ORTC (a WebRTC variant), but has not yet added DataChannel support which the multiplayer engine uses. When they add that, we'll look in to supporting it.

Gotcha, thanks for the update. I'm gonna bug my MS contact to see if they have a timeline...

**EDIT

Did some poking around Ashley, this seems to say DataChannel is now possible, though not an official source: https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/25/webrtc-on-the-edge/

That just seems to cover getUserMedia (i.e. webcam/microphone feeds). I'm not aware there's any official support for DataChannel yet, but I think it's in the works.