Google Chrome adds support for H265 in WebRTC

[spencerchance]

I feel like we've waited for this forever, but Chrome 136 will officially support H265/HEVC in WebRTC [1]

At the time of writing this, the current stable version of Chrome is 135, but version 136 is available as a beta. [2]

I tested a video stream that was encoded using H265+ from an IP camera that was passed through MediaMTX, and was able to successfully view it using WebRTC. I am incredibly stoked and am looking forward to expanding my configuration once the Chrome release is stable. Just wanted to share.
 
1: https://chromestatus.com/roadmap
2: https://www.google.com/chrome/beta/

[aler9]

Yes we've been aware of this for some time. However, be careful that H265 decoding only works when your PC has a GPU or a hardware decoder, they haven't embedded a software decoder inside Chrome in order not to infringe patents.
Therefore, a royalty free codec like AV1 is the most compatible way to distribute highly-compressed video streams.