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Media Source Extensions for WebCodecs

Category
Multimedia
Type
New or changed feature
Status
Origin trial (Chrome Origin trial)
Intent stage
Origin Trial

Summary

Extends the Media Source Extensions API (MSE) to enable buffering containerless WebCodecs encoded media chunks with MSE for low-latency buffering and seekable playback.

Motivation

MSE requires applications to provide fragments of containerized media (such as fragmented MP4, WebM, or MP3) to be able to buffer and play that media. If the application already has the media in a parsed and structured form, it can cost extra latency and code complexity to package that media into a container and feed it to MSE. As the web platform is evolving to give applications lower-level abstractions for efficiently encoding and decoding media via the WebCodecs API, MSE can use WebCodecs media structures to let applications more efficiently feed their media to MSE. Use cases include simplifying and improving performance of transmuxing HLS-TS into fMP4 for buffering with MSE, and low-latency streaming with a seekable buffer.

Standards & signals

Docs: https://github.com/wolenetz/mse-for-webcodecs/blob/main/explainer.md https://rawgit.com/wolenetz/media-source/mse-for-webcodecs-draft/media-source-respec.html#webcodecs-based

Explainers: https://github.com/wolenetz/mse-for-webcodecs/blob/main/explainer.md

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