WebCodecs is a flexible web API for encoding and decoding audio and video

by twapi • 5 years ago

18 4 5 years ago

mcraiha• 5 years ago

I assume one cannot add additional codecs to this without browser support? so e.g. I want to use NVIDIA NVENC to encode H.264 video, but that won't happen until my browser has implemented support for it.

soylentgraham• 5 years ago

This would be done at the OS level, no? a mediaFoundation codec for nvenc/nvdec (or rather it's new name, which Ive forgotten), or via V4L2 etc

Would be frustrating to write an OS codec and have to wait for chromium to explicitly integrate my own codec

streamer45• 5 years ago

This is great and overdue. Hopefully all major browsers will add some support for open source/royalty free codecs.

Emscripten/WebAssembly actually worked rather well with audio (OPUS is just awesome) but when it comes to video it's just unfeasible, especially if you are looking at doing low latency streaming. That said, I cannot fail to mention the incredible effort done by ogv.js [1] to make a/v decoding possible almost anywhere.

Looking forward to experiment with this new API.

[1] https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

0xy• 5 years ago

Even though I can see the utility with this API, every single new web API seems to be a privacy and security disaster that conveniently enables the ad industry to obtain more data points to track you.

AudioContext is a new "modern" JS API that is used almost exclusively by ad networks for tracking. It reveals latency information about your audio peripherals with no prompting, no permission and it operates silently on websites that literally never play audio.

WASM is used for tracking over 90% of the time.

All of the garbage Chrome has added to navigator and document objects, sometimes without documentation are used almost exclusively for egregious tracking.

WebCodecs is a flexible web API for encoding and decoding audio and video

Related Stories