Re: [Ring] Ring and proprietary codecs

[Thomas Daede]

On 08/04/2017 12:39 PM, Philippe Gorley wrote:
> You are correct. As for audio codecs, we use Opus, G722, speex, PCMA,
> and PCMU. Would you know if any of these are also proprietary?

Those are all free. From a technical standpoint, Opus is always a better
choice than the rest of the codecs listed (sounds better for the same
bitrate, sounds better with packet loss), but the only harm in
supporting them is extra code.

> I am currently working on fine tuning the VP8 settings to make it our
> codec of choice.

Great! Let me know if you need any help. We have VP8 as our preferred
codec in Firefox (with VP9 supported as well).

>> * Make dependence on proprietary codecs optional
>> * Turn off proprietary codecs by default
> 
> This could be possible in the future, and something we should look into.

Sooner is better than later. You don't want to get into the situation
where proprietary codecs are required for compatibility with old Ring
clients. We were able to work around this for WebRTC for one codec (with
OpenH264) but that's not applicable to the other 2 proprietary codecs.
Plus, starting fresh, there's no reason to get into that mess at all.

(plus, as you may have guessed by now, I'm really not a huge fan of a
GNU project endorsing or supporting proprietary codecs)