You may have read a post from earlier on this week about Chrome dropping support for getUserMedia on sites delivered via the HTTP transport. But there was a ton of other stuff in that talk from Google at Kranky Geek that we didn't even mention. So here's a roundup of those changes to get excited about:
- The way your traffic is routed is due to change. Depending on whether or not you've given permission to the website to use the camera/microphone, the WebRTC stack will decide how to route your traffic; via your default route or the 'best' deemed route. This is to address the "IP Leakage" issues we faced earlier in the year.
- RSA certs will be disappearing and will be replaced with ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm) which is FAST in comparison, which will lead to calls being setup far quicker. You'll see a huge difference especially on mobile devices. You can go and try it out in Chrome 47.
- Awesome updates in Delay Agnostic Acoustic Echo Cancellation (DAAEC) have been pretty much rolled out to Windows, Linux and Chrome OS, OSX should hopefully start to be rolled out soon. You can also turn the new DAAEC on or off using a
googDAEchoCancellationconstraint. - Freaking awesome improvements in the performance of screen-sharing in Chrome; it has to be seen to be believed. It was released in Chrome 45.
- Huge mobile improvements. 5x faster rendering, huge improvements in GPU and CPU usage which then has a huge impact on battery usage. Audio improvements on Android and iOS as well as hardware encoder support for video on Android and iOS which is brilliant.
- Video smoothness in Chrome has improved considerably. Chrome now figures out frame and render length much better than before.
- Being able to set which audio output device you end up using which is brilliant news.
- New data channel API which enables you to know when your data channel buffer is low and you can send more data. This is great news for anyone using the data channel for any heavy data usage applications.
- WebRTC now works with ipV6 on Chrome, Android and iOS
- Soon there will be cocoaPod releases for iOS and a new API. This will reduce the time needed to get your app up and running in terms of development. This has been quite a large bugbear that many mobile developers have had to put up with, so huge news for them.
- VP9 without a feature flag is just around the corner. This brings with it huge benefits in bandwidth and CPU usage, as well as quality at reduced bandwidth, or even better quality at the same bandwidth. It's a huge win for everyone.
- H.264 in Chrome by the end of the year hopefully.
MediaStreamRecorderhopefully released with Chrome 47 (by the end of this year) - which is great news for people who want to be able to record their streams for whatever reason. This could have huge benefits to certain businesses for example.- Soon enough you'll never have to munge SDP ever again; you'll have full control over changing codecs, bandwidth etc using proper object APIs
We think those are pretty amazing additions to WebRTC and it's awesome to see the rate in which the WebRTC stack is evolving and maturing. You can check out the full talk from Kranky Geek on youtube.
