Packetization

[aboba]

The APIs make sense for encoding a bitstream, transporting it reliably then decoding and rendering it.

But what if you want to packetize an encoded bitstream within QUIC datagrams and then reassemble and decode it on the other side?

Or what if you want a mixture of reliable and unreliable transport? For example, you might want to provide different transport for keyframes and P-frames. So you might want to separate out portions of the encoded bitstream for reliable transport, and other portions for datagram transport.

[steveanton]

Networking packetization is out of scope unless it's something useful that the codec supports/specifies. For example, splitting VP8 bitstream into RTP packets is out of scope but exposing the two types of H264 bitstream is in scope.

Separating the bitstreams by type should be quite possible. Whatever reads the output of the encoder TransformStream will know whether the bitstream packet is a key frame or delta frame and can route the chunk accordingly.

Re: unreliable transport. WebCodecs will support indicating to the decoder if the bitstream chunks are discontinuous due to e.g. packet loss.

[pthatcherg]

I think this overlaps, to a degree, with this new tracking issue: #24. If you squint, RTP is a container format.