It has been a few years since the WebRTC codec wars ended in a detente. H.264 has been around for more than 15 years so it is easy to gloss over the the many intricacies that make it work.
Reknown hackathon star, live-coder, and |pipe| CTO Tim Panton was working on a drone project where he needed a light-weight H.264 stack for WebRTC, so he decided to build one. This is certainly not an exercise I would recommend for most, but Tim shows it can be an enlightening experience if not an easy one. In this post, Tim walks us through his step-by-step discovery as he just tries to get video to work. Check it out for an enjoyable alternative to reading through RFCs specs for an intro on H.264! ...