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by chadnickbok 3426 days ago
This is really cool! But the compression quality of MPEG1 is really nowhere close to h264.

If you're interested in this sorta thing, try taking a look at Broadway JS: https://github.com/mbebenita/Broadway

Here's a simple demo page they have setup: http://mbebenita.github.io/Broadway/foxDemo.html

Its entirely possible to use WebSockets to stream H264 to a browser and decode using broadway, and the performance is pretty good, even on mobile.
4 comments
espadrine 3426 days ago
Beyond the valid patent worries (Broadway.js uses Android code, which isn't cleared by the MPAA in the way the Cisco code is), I would be interested to have a proper comparison with jsmpeg in terms of FPS and battery use on mobile. I would assume there is a CPU cost associated with more complex decoding operations.

Edit: here is jsmpeg's author talking about it:

> There's been an experiment, called Broadway.js, which tries to decode H.264 in JavaScript. And there's some demos available, but I haven't been able to make this work consistently. It's very flaky. It tries to decode different stuff, and different threads And it barely works, if it works at all, so-- and you have to download, maybe, one megabyte of JavaScript for this. It's all part of EM script. [sic — emscripten?] And it's-- yeah, it's very complicated to get working, which is why the MPEG1 form of this is so nice for this, because it's so simple. And you end up with a decoder that's 30 kilobytes in size.

https://fronteers.nl/congres/2015/sessions/jsmpeg-by-dominic...

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markonen 3426 days ago
This seems risky to use in production due to H.264 patent issues. MPEG-1, on the other hand, could seemingly work as a drop-in replacement for GIFs in a variety of cases with no such worries.
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colek42 3426 days ago
I did it for a hack-a-thon a couple months back. Actually works quite well.

https://github.com/colek42/streamingDemo

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wmf 3426 days ago
Don't browsers have built-in native H.264 support?
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colek42 3426 days ago
Media source extensions don't give you the low-level control needed for low-latency and streams need to be re-muxed into fMP4. Web-RTC is a good option, but the infrastructure required can be a non-starter for many projects. For example, native webRTC libraries for golang are currently lacking to support needed to stream low-latency video.
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