Microsoft recently announced Object RTC (ORTC) support in the public builds of their new browser Edge. Although this will only run with Windows 10, it is a huge step forward for the WebRTC community and earlier versions of Internet Explorer will still have to rely on plugins (e.g., Temasys) for it to work. Microsoft’s blog post walkedthrough a sample peer-to-peer audio application and a running demo is available as well.
ORTC is a proposal for WebRTC v1.1, enhancement to WebRTC v1.0 which does away with the Session Description Protocol (SDP) as an interface to control the media and transport pipeline. Consequently, ORTC lets the developer directly manipulate the pipeline. Meanwhile, the goal of ORTC is still to be compatible with WebRTC v1.0 and this is enabled by shim libraries, which wrap the ORTC operations in WebRTC v1.0 APIs. Essentialy this announcement brings WebRTC for Edge one step closer to reality. There are currently two libraries available:
- Google’s adapter.js extended by Philippe Hancke to support ORTC,
- Twilio’s ortc-adapter.js.
Marcin and Karthik quickly added Edge support to callstats.io and our demo application, there were some gotchas (thanks Fippo for the heads up). Earlier this week, &yet too made their first cross-browser WebRTC session.
ORTC’s statistics model is slightly different from the WebRTC’s statistics model, but they both return the same metrics. Currently, the getStats() API in Microsoft Edge (Build 13.10547) returns quite rudimentary statistics: the round-trip time (RTT), the packets sent and received. However, several important metrics are missing, for example, jitter, and bytes sent or received. The bytes metric is important to calculate the sent and received throughput. We are eagerly waiting for future iterations of the Edge browser, which will hopefully expose more statistics. We will keep you posted on the progress and the forthcoming release of callstats.js v3.6 will officially add support for Microsoft Edge.
The dashboard shows the RTT metric in the timeline graph and lists Microsoft Edge as the browser in the participants table.
Some additional links of interest:
- ortc.org
- ORTC Specification
- Phillip Hancke’s ORTC stats demo
- Microsoft’s ORTC demo
- Twilio and ORTC phone call demo
