Microsoft has been working for some time to add support for Real Time Communications in its Microsoft Edge web browser in Windows 10. The Edge team have now offered an update on their progress, which aims to give users a way to call others directly from a browser without the need to download a plugin.
In a blog post, Microsoft stated that late in 2015, it added support for the H.264UC video codec and is currently working to add support for the H.264/AVC codec sometime in the next few months. It stated:
The H.264 format is historically the preferred option in the RTC industry. H.264 support has been widely adopted across hardware platforms, and has broad hardware offload support, for improved performance and video quality. We're excited to see more modern browsers now supporting the H.264 video format in WebRTC implementations—Firefox has shipped support for H.264/AVC, and initial H.264 support is now available in Chrome Canary (behind a flag).
Microsoft added that the Edge team is prototyping a subset of the WebRTC 1.0 audio API "natively within the Edge Platform":
Finally, we're investigating support for the VP8 codec within both the ORTC and WebRTC 1.0 APIs in Edge. Once we have laid the foundation for video interoperability within the Edge RTP stack and demonstrated progress toward H.264/AVC interoperability, support for interoperability with additional codecs will become feasible. At that point we intend to begin work on an interoperable implementation supporting VP8.
