And you are here why?

“ Genius lies in inventing stuff that is totally obvious in retrospect ”  — Me Every now and then you see stuff that genuinely surprises you. Oh, not in the “ it’s a floor-wax  and  a salad-dressing ” sense, but in the “ good god, that is so ridiculously obvious, why didn’t  I   think of that? ” sense. Fouladi et al (•).  have pulled off  two  of these with their new approach to video encoding — in their approach to architecting streaming video, and actually writing the codecs Video Streaming Let’s look at the architecture first. Most (all?) video streaming systems these days have two major components, a codec to encode the video, and a transport protocol to get it to the destination. The way the system usually works is that that the transport protocol figures out the network capacity the best it can, by looking at congestion, RTT, etc. The codec then uses the capacity to figure out what levels of compression to apply to the video, so that t...

You know, and I know, that Video Chat isn't taking the world over by storm, even though it is supposed to happen Any Day Now.  The lock-in factor is definitely a  culprit - think of all the services out there, and how none  of them inter-operate Skype GTalk Hangout Tango FaceTime TinyChat oh, the list goes on.  And none  of them work with each other.  Mind you, this is even before we get into Device issues (quick!  Can your Polycom work with eyeBeam?), not to mention the horror that is 'Standards' (For some fun bed-time reading, check this out! ). Enter WebRTC .  Its a simple standard that enables Javascript based RTC.  The API document may look complicated, but it really is not.  Much more importantly, it is simple , open, and did I mention, simple * ?   Serge LaChapelle of Marratech fame is now over at Google moving 'em into the WebRTC world **.  Expect to see the fruits of this work to show up in G+ Han...