What's the best way to add a transcoding middleware that convert HEVC to h264?

[rodrigofariow]

Hi there 👋

I'm relatively new to the world of codecs and HLS and I would like to ask for help on the following use case:

• I have a video player that will receive stream urls that are always on h265.
  Given the current browser and hardware support I can't rely on having this hls stream be displayed in h265 at all times.

So, to workaround this, when Media source identifies that h265 can not be played, I was thinking of using ffmpeg.wasm to transcode data, as it comes, to h264, for broader support.

Question:
What's the best and most efficient place to integrate this logic using hls.js?

Thank you

[robwalch]

HLS.js is a streaming library meant to be used as a playback engine. It is not a vehicle for transcoding.

Encoding should happen before packaging into HLS and delivering to clients running HLS.js.

[rodrigofariow]

First of all, thank you for the quick response @robwalch !

My company use case is that the machines that will stream the h265 content don't have a lot of CPU power to transcode to h264 at scale.

So the idea was to offload that transcoding to the browser when the customer hardware/browser does not support h265 natively.

Still exploring but I've heard it can be done, just not sure how.

How would you go about solving something like this?
HLS.js is not a good fit at all then?

Thank you again for your time