PSA: Support for H.264 video codec in Chrome behind flag

Chrome support

In Chrome M-50 a new H.264 encoder/decoder pair is included in WebRTC for desktop versions of Chrome behind a command line flag. This means that it is now in Chrome Canary!

Launch Chrome executable with: --enable-features=WebRTC-H264WithOpenH264FFmpeg

This is a software encoder/decoder. Encoding is implemented using OpenH264 and decoding is implemented using FFmpeg.

Try it

Using Canary you can try WebRTC video calls with H.264 out at https://apprtc.appspot.com/r/<some room id>?vsc=H264&vrc=H264 (“video send codec”, “video receive codec”) and optionally with &debug=loopback for loopback in a single tab. Press i during a call to get stats, including which video codec is used. You can also go to chrome://webrtc-internals in a separate tab for more information, see “ssrc_..._send/recv”.

(There is also https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/peerconnection/munge-sdp/ where you can modify the SDP manually. After "Create offer" you can verify that “H264” is listed in the Offer SDP and modify the m=video line to put the H.264 ID first in the list of IDs.)

Stability note

This is still under development and not entirely stable, yet. There may be delays in the video (between local and loopback), bad performance, dropped frames (lag) and decode errors (image freezing/going black). The feature will not be unflagged until these issues have been resolved.

Please help us to move this feature from behind a flag into Chrome stable by testing and filing bugs :)