A blog reader asked an interesting question a question about H.264 support in Lync. There have been a number of announcements on H.264 integration with multiple pieces of software:
- HD Video in Lync 2013
- Q&A Microsoft Lync 2013 Video and H.264 UVC 1.5 Encoding Offloading Webcams
- Skype for Business client video requirements
- C930e with Lync 2013
- Perhaps this is already irrelevant, but I already spend some time digging that out:
Fantastic news! I will just leave the links here (perhaps they are not even all quite relevant) for the time I would want to revisit this pile of issues (or this would hopefully never happen). Some of them are from quite some past. Presently, however people having really hard time getting stuff working well one with another:
- How to support hardware encoded H264 though UVC “I was able to get that stream under Windows 8.x was by NOT USING LOGITECH DRIVERS”
- Interfacing with a UVC 1.1 H.264 extension device with DirectShow
- How to access the H264 stream from webcams that feature H264 hardware encoders?
Let’s just make one thing clear. I do have Windows 8.1 system which is supposed to pick up UVC 1.5 compliant camera, and I do have “1st of New Generation of UVC 1.5 H.264 WebCams” Logitech Webcam C930e camera.
More to that, I do see it does do H.264 (in a weird way but still – and the camera itself is really cool, I like it!):
As a user, I expect that Lync 2013 (Skype for Business 2015) somehow figure the H.264 support out and do the thing out of the box. This is what the original question I was asked was about. What I do see – and this is what I was able to “touch” myself to avoid guesswork – is that a preview video feed from the device is NOT using H.264:
Well, maybe it is leveraging H.264 in real conference? Not sure.
Perhaps Skype can capture H.264? Oops, not it cannot (this is from real video call session):
Okay, it simply does not all work yet. As a guess, this worked with Windows 7 style of H.264 webcam and then the way Windows 8 offered support for UVC 1.5 devices broke it (if it at all ever worked!).