Microsoft goes its own way with Web audio/video spec, despite W3C rebuff

Microsoft has published a working prototype of CU-RTC-Web, its proposed specification for enabling browser-based, plugin-free, real-time audio and video communication.

CU-RTC-Web isn’t the only proposal for such a specification. In fact, it’s not even the main one. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that formalizes the development and specification of Web-related standards, has its own group working on a plugin-free, real-time audio and video communication specification called WebRTC. Preliminary—and somewhat rudimentary—support for WebRTC is found in current versions of Chrome and Firefox.

This support certainly isn’t finished yet, and interoperability between the browsers remains troublesome—many of the online WebRTC demos are built for Chrome alone and won’t work with Firefox at all—but in theory they’re on track to support the same specification in a manner that will eventually be compatible.