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Comment by hcfman | Hacker News Reader

It is possible to do something like webrtc without using one of h264 or h265 and have it work on all browser versions ?

Normally, apple quicktime containers with h264 payloads are playable everywhere. If you drop h264 or h265 there is no such play anywhere container available anymore right ?

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VP8 should be required by the base WebRTC spec, but some devices only have hardware acceleration for H.264 so you should test the actual performance before changing codecs. Also consider using VP9 / AV1 if you know all the devices in a call support it and are fast enough to encode/decode it.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...

> Which codecs can be within those tracks is not mandated by the WebRTC specification. However, RFC 7742 specifies that all WebRTC-compatible browsers must support VP8 and H.264's Constrained Baseline profile for video, and RFC 7874 specifies that browsers must support at least the Opus codec as well as G.711's PCMA and PCMU formats.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Fo...

Correct. The most supported container and codec families are those coming out of the MPEG - .mp3, .m4a, .mp4, H.264, H.265 etc. - because they are the products of a giant standards effort. A lot of modern TVs and set-top boxes will accept content in e.g. the Matroska container, and VP/AV video content, but unfortunately support still isn't at the level of the MPEGs.

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