Video Interop: a Rorschach Diagram

June 17, 2010 by Dave Michels

I took the task of writing about video interoperability on NoJitter this week. The Inner Workings Of Interoperability This is one deep topic and I had no idea how much good and bad there was to write about it until...

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By Dave Michels

Dave is an independent analyst and founder of TalkingPointz which is focused on enterprise communications. In addition to this (free and paid) content on TalkingPointz, he contributes to industry sites, can be found at major industry events, and provides advisory services to vendors and financial analysts.

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Discussion

Chris Norman June 18, 2010

H323 isnt a video codec. It is a group of signaling protocols that can take advantage of a number of different standards based video codecs (including H263 and h264).

H263 is a pretty common interop video codec currently used among companies that are aimed at the entperise. Most of the companies that support video support this as well (including Microsoft). The real question is what codec do they use as a common platform to go to the next step which is HD. I think you will find that most of these companies that have a proprietary protocol did so to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and effectively support high quality video over the internet. Which is fine. H264 does have a big following though and I wouldnt mind making the bet this is what the UCIF choose as a default interop protocol.

I think people over estimate Google’s influence on the market at times.

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Dave Michels June 18, 2010

Thanks Chris.
H.323 is commonly used incorrectly to represent the codec. Generally speaking, most H.323 systems use H.261 (with increasing support for H.263 and H.264) as the codec, and interoperability in this space (room systems) is reasonably mature.

Many desktop systems support H.323, but the simpler ones, often associated with the "video phone" tend to use H.264 (or H.263) and SIP for signaling.

But even if we reach compatibility, call setup and configuration (user interop) is still a big challenge as is SIP signaling support over SIP trunks.

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Tsahi Levent-Levi June 30, 2010

Dave,
You should also check what the IMTC is doing regarding SIP interoperability for video. They are trying to achieve what they have successfully done for H.323 – robust interoperability between vendors.
http://www.imtc.org/activity_groups/SIP.asp

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