KRkrebby·Oct 30, 2023
Encoding alpha, please! https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs/issues/672
Thanks for the great work on WebCodecs!
In Replacing WebRTC: real-time latency with WebTransport and WebCodecsw3c
webcodecs
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w3c / webcodecs
webcodecs
WebCodecs is a flexible web API for encoding and decoding audio and video.
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15Mentions
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1.3KGitHub stars
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What it is
WebCodecs is a flexible web API for encoding and decoding audio and video.
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- w3c/webtransport · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
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HN mentions by year15 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-01-04 03:40:26 UTC to 2025-12-25 17:15:04 UTC.
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View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sources* Hmm, what kind of scheme are you thinking beyond per frame QP? Does an abstraction on top of QP work for the case you have in mind?
* Reference frame control seems to be https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs/issues/285, there's some interest in this for 2024, so I'd expect progress here.
* Does splitting frames in WebGPU/WebGL work for the use case here? I'm not sure we could do anything internally (we're at the mercy of hardware decode implementations) without implementing such a shader.
In Replacing WebRTC: real-time latency with WebTransport and WebCodecsThe amount of frames necessary is going to depend on the codec and bitstream parameters. If it's H264 or H265, there's some more discussion and links here: https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs/issues/698#issuecomment-161...
The optimizeForLatency parameter may also help in some cases:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/VideoDecode...
In Replacing WebRTC: real-time latency with WebTransport and WebCodecshttps://blog.paul.cx/post/audio-video-synchronization-with-t... has some background, https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs/blob/main/samples/lib/web_a... is part of a full example that you can run using web codecs, web audio, audioworklet SharedArrayBuffer, and does A/V sync.
If it doesn't answer your question let me know because I wrote both (and part of the web audio spec, and part of the webcodecs spec).
In Replacing WebRTC: real-time latency with WebTransport and WebCodecsThanks for the nice write up! I work on the WebCodecs team at Chrome. I'm glad to hear it's mostly working for you. If you (or anyone else) has specific requests for new knobs regarding "We may need more encoding options, like non-reference frames or SVC", please file issues at https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs/issues
In Replacing WebRTC: real-time latency with WebTransport and WebCodecsFrom developer.mozilla.org [0]
> WebCodecs API
> The WebCodecs API gives web developers low-level access to the individual frames of a video stream and chunks of audio. It is useful for web applications that require full control over the way media is processed. For example, video or audio editors, and video conferencing.
And from w3c [1]:
> The WebCodecs API allows web applications to encode and decode audio and video
All this looks really promising, I wouldn't have thought that we could use browsers directly to render videos. Maybe Puppeteer could then stream the content of the page it is rendering, for example a three.js animation.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebCodecs_A...
[1] https://github.com/w3c/webcodecs
In Real-Time Video Processing with WebCodecs and Streams