WebRTC Video Codecs performance evaluation
The standard and most popular codecs in WebRTC are VP8 and H.264 but those are not the only options we have. VP9 has been available for a while and some big services are using it and AV1 support has been recently added to Chrome . When comparing codecs there are interesting considerations like interoperability and licensing but probably the most important factors are how good the codec is in terms of compression and how cheap the codec is in terms of cpu&memory usage. The compression ratio is usually the first thing we look at and there are many comparisons available for that, but the resource consumption is equally important if we want to be able to use the codecs for real time use cases. Given that AV1 is available in the Chrome Canary versions I decided to run some tests to get estimation of where we stand in terms of cpu usage for the 4 available codecs in WebRTC ecosystem. The idea of the test is to compare the whole video pipeline with ...