Hello I am currently building a live streaming solution that takes H.264 encoded video over RTSP, converts it to WebRTC, and then sends it to an HTML5 browser. H.264 is supported over WebRTC, and almost all browsers seem to support H.264 decoding, so I figure there is no need for any transcoding. However, many implementations of what I'm trying to do seem to involve transcoding the H.264 to VP8 and I am wondering why that is necessary. What would be the benefit of doing this? And are there any statistics I can look at to figure out exactly how much latency would be added due to this transcoding?
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There is no value in transcoding to VP8 unless you have clients that only support VP8. If you transcode you will get a decoder delay and an encoder delay. Best case one frame each. If you have B-frames in your H.264 the decode delay can increase to 3 or more frames. Potentially the decode/encode could be higher due to implementation details of the codecs.
Markus Schumann
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