Stumbling over Microsoft’s Video Conferencing Dataset (VCD) I asked Claude to take on a video codec engineer’s favorite hot take: compare video codecs. It did a fairly good writeup using the tooling provided by libWebRTC. One of the most surprising results was that background blur makes H.264 a lot more effective. Other than that, the […]
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What I learned about H.264 for WebRTC video (Tim Panton)
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 […]
How to capture & replay WebRTC video streams with video_replay (Stian Selnes)
Note: see here for a 2025 update to this post. Decoding video when there is packet loss is not an easy task. Recent Chrome versions have been plagued by video corruption issues related to a new video jitter buffer introduced in Chrome 58. These issues are hard to debug since they occur only when certain […]
WebRTC beyond one-to-one communication (Gustavo Garcia Bernardo)
WebRTC and its peer-to-peer capabilities are great for one-to-one communications. However, when I discuss with customers use cases and services that go beyond one-to-one, namely one-to-many or many-to-many, the question arises: “OK, but what architecture shall I use for this?”. Some service providers want to reuse the multicast support they have in their networks (we […]
WebRTC Video Codec Debate: Is There No End in Sight? (Chris Wendt)
As detailed in previous posts on webrtcHacks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has worked for the past few years to standardize the “on-the-wire” protocols that make up the WebRTC engine. It is coming up on 3 months since IETF 88 in Vancouver, where the IETF was to have settled the matter of a mandatory-to-implement […]