Description

The WebCodecs API gives web developers low-level access to the individual frames of a video stream and chunks of audio. It is useful for web applications that require full control over the way media is processed. For example, video or audio editors, and video conferencing.

Source

Read more in this web dev article

Rationale

There are several online editors for editing and processing audio and video files on the internet these days. Such websites eliminate the need for downloading and installing heavy-duty software on your computer. All you need to do is search for online editing tools, and Google will provide you with all the websites providing this service.

From the programmer’s perspective, building such web applications can be difficult. There are a lot of features that they need to implement to make a functional online video editor. And without a doubt, APIs will come into play.

WebCodecs API is a powerful web API that lets developers access the individual frames of a video. It also helps developers to encode and decode audio and video files. It does all this by working on a separate thread. This way, the site responsiveness is not compromised by the processing load.

The API provides access to a lot of features, for instance,

• Raw video frames
  

• Image decoder
  

• Audio/Video encoders and decoders
  

• Audio data
  

The WebCodecs API is under the hood used by several other APIs. For instance, Web Audio API, MediaRecoder API, WebRTC API, etc., all use WebCodecs for processing audio and video.

The WebCodecs API consists of a lot of different interfaces, but almost all of them are not supported by Firefox and Safari.

Specification

W3C

Tests

No response