#433: WebCodecs

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Opened Oct 18, 2019

Hello TAG!

I'm requesting a TAG review of:

Further details:

You should also know that...

  • The review is early on in the design stage because we expect to learn a lot from early implementation feedback, so we'd like to get a rough design reviewed so that we can begin implementations and get that feedback to further refine the design.
  • A portion of the explainer and WebIDL could be done a separate standard from WebCodecs, namely the conversions from WHATWG streams to MediaStreamTracks (called TrackWriters and TrackReaders at the moment). Many use cases require these, but use cases outside of WebCodecs could also find these useful. For simplicity, we are considering such work inside the scope of WebCodecs, although it could be pulled out later.

We'd prefer the TAG provide feedback as (please select one):

  • open issues in our GitHub repo for each point of feedback

Discussions

2019-11-19

Minutes

Dan: David?

David: Looked briefly - it seems probably good for a high level perspective but I think we should maybe look closer if we have the expertise.

Dan: If we do this at the F2F we should get an external expert.

2020-03-16

Minutes

Scribe: Alice (with assistance)

Tess: I took a look at this earlier... not actually assigned to me but I took a look anyway. Maybe it could be a propose close? Sangwhan had one question, it's been answered, and David thought it looked fine.

... I started looking into it a little bit... this is in the Intent to Implement:

Safari: Negative signals (concerns over keeping it fingerprinting neutral)

... Should we take another look from the perspective of fingerprinting?

Sangwhan: I don't understand how this is another fingerprint. Either you'd be have (less than a handful of) silicon provided encoders or you'd have ffmpeg. The codec availability at most gives you as much entropy as knowing say, your phone model number which we happily dump on the UA string

Tess: I'm going to dig up the minutes from TPAC to find where the fingerprinting conversation happened, and what the specific concerns were, so we can follow up in our issue

2020-03-23

Minutes

[bumped but we can still chat in the plenary

2020-04-20

Minutes

Discussed closing at the plenary.

Peter raised a question about using these codec apis in existing codec usage, such as MediaRecorder.