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    Real World Video Compression
    by Andy Beach
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« Encoding for the iPad pt 1 | Main | Food for thought »
Thursday
Jun102010

What Video Codec does iPhone's FaceTime use?

When Apple announced the new iPhone 4 this week, one of the coller features announced was the front facing camera and the new FaceTime feature.  Of course, its early days for thinking about video chat on the go, but as someone who travels quite a bit for work, I really like the idea of having access to a quick video conferencing type option on the go.

 

Of course, the video geek in me immediately wondered about the video specs behind this.  Steve announced it shared H.264 with iChat, amonst other things, but i wondered what else was invovled.  I found this list over at Apple Insider:

 

  • H.264 and AAC, its ISO/MPEG video and audio codecs (just like iChat).
  • SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), the open IETF signaling protocol for VoIP used by iChat AV.
  • STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT), an IETF standard for dealing with lots of different kinds of NAT. 
  • TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT), an IETF standard for allowing a client behind NAT to receive incoming requests like a server.
  • ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) an IETF standard which helps set up connections through NAT firewalls. 
  • RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol), an iETF standard for delivering media streams in VoIP.
  • SRTP (Secure RTP) an IETF standard designed to provide encryption, message authentication and integrity for the data streams.
  • H.264 and AAC, its ISO/MPEG video and audio codecs (just like iChat).SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), the open IETF signaling protocol for VoIP used by iChat AV.STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT), an IETF standard for dealing with lots of different kinds of NAT. TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT), an IETF standard for allowing a client behind NAT to receive incoming requests like a server.ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) an IETF standard which helps set up connections through NAT firewalls. RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol), an iETF standard for delivering media streams in VoIP.SRTP (Secure RTP) an IETF standard designed to provide encryption, message authentication and integrity for the data streams.

These specs would lead me to believe this is can be adopted into a wide range of products, which is good.  the usefulness of this product goes down dramatically if i can only do video calls to other iphone 4's on wifi (which was what was suggested in the keynote).  Skype is nervously eyeing this and I for one hope they adopt it, as this is what i've used for most of my video calls to date.

 

 

 

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