FaceTime on the Mac

The FaceTime Beta UI. On the left is the image from your camera and on the right is your addressbook, recent calls, and favorites list.This morning Apple, INC made several announcements, including availability of a beta FaceTime application for OSX 10.6 and later.  As I mentioned, FaceTime is a Snow Leopard only application and requires an account with Apple to use (i'm using my MobileMe account, but I believe any iTunes Store account would work as well).

The experience is pretty good, I was able to quickly do a facetime chat with my brother, both from the desktop and my iPhone4 (he was on the desktop beta for both.  The quality from the phone was much better, but that's because I'm using a 3rd party webcam on my MacPro which is much lower quality than the current line of built-in cameras on the Macbook Pro's, iMacs, and the Monitors.

Like the iPhone4, this is most likely a streaming h.264 video stream, though i'm unsure the specs being used for the encode, i'll root around and see if i can figure that out this week and do an update.

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.