0 Fork 0

Files

T

AAA 87883748b6 docs(product): settle Browser v9 work (#218 )

Checkpoint the accepted Browser v9 product contract before implementation. Current source and production remain v8.

2026-08-24 03:51:19 +08:00

25 KiB

Raw Blame History

Native Shared-Encode Sender

Research date: 2026-08-19
Scope: one Windows game-capture sender, one encoded video stream, and at most two independent standard WebRTC media edges
Status: stacked Draft PRs #16/#18/#22/#23/#25/#28 pass one bounded live two-leg WebCodecs/Pion candidate, and the later Native path has one Viewer delivery proof. Two-leg product shared encoding and release remain unproven.

Decision Input

TeamSpeak-style shared encoding is a required later sender phase. It can remove duplicate host encoding work, but it cannot remove the upload copy, RTP state, or congestion control required by each outgoing edge. The first implementation must prove one narrow property before adding capture, audio, UI, or packaging:

Two unmodified browser viewers receive two independent WebRTC sessions while one physical encoder invocation produces the compatible encoded access unit consumed by both sessions.

The completed Pion/WebCodecs research ladder proves a narrower property: one JavaScript VideoEncoder object emitted the encoded chunks consumed by two browser sessions. WebCodecs does not expose physical encoder-instance counts, and Chrome used hardwareAcceleration: "no-preference" after rejecting the single allowed prefer-hardware attempt. The result therefore must not be described as one hardware or physical encode.

The preferred first experiment is a standalone Windows C++ sender using a fixed libwebrtc revision. It keeps libwebrtc's mature PeerConnection, RTP/RTCP, pacing, NACK/RTX, DTLS-SRTP, and ICE behavior on each edge. Electron is not part of the media experiment; it can only wrap a proven helper later.

Minimal Risk Spike

existing Node signaling
        |
Windows sender.exe
synthetic source -> shared encoder coordinator -> encoder proxy A -> PC A -> browser A
                                      `--------> encoder proxy B -> PC B -> browser B

Windows x64, C++, video-only, fixed 720p30, and exactly two outgoing edges.
Inject a custom VideoEncoderFactory into libwebrtc. It returns two proxy encoders, one for each normal send pipeline.
Each proxy keeps its own EncodedImageCallback; one coordinator owns the physical counting encoder.
The coordinator deduplicates matching input-frame timestamps and publishes the same reference-counted encoded buffer to both callbacks.
Reject the second edge when codec, profile, dimensions, or layer configuration differ. Never hide incompatibility by creating a second physical encoder.
For this fixed single-layer spike only, aggregate the two SetRates() requests by taking the minimum total target bitrate and frame rate, bounded by the selected profile. This is an experiment safety policy, not a product design: one weak edge can lower a healthy edge, so productization is forbidden. Independent quality requires another representation, an accepted scalable design, or transcoding.
Coalesce PLI/keyframe requests so one physical keyframe is delivered to both packetizers. RTP sequence numbers, SSRC, TWCC, pacing, retransmission caches, RTCP, DTLS-SRTP, and ICE remain independent per edge.

libwebrtc officially permits an application to inject a VideoEncoderFactory and defines VideoEncoder::Encode, SetRates, loss/RTT notifications, and the encoded callback. It does not promise cross-PeerConnection shared encoding. The proxy/coordinator design is therefore an inference that this spike must validate, not a supported feature claim.

Stop the libwebrtc route if two send pipelines produce incompatible cadence, timestamps, adaptation, or callback behavior and correctness would require a fork of VideoStreamEncoder, RtpVideoSender, or another libwebrtc internal. Do not carry a permanent media-engine fork for this feature.

Capture And Hardware Encoding Come Later

Only after the synthetic two-edge property passes:

Capture a window or display with Windows Graphics Capture into a D3D11 surface.
Convert BGRA to NV12 once. Do not claim zero-copy until profiling proves the actual texture path.
Enumerate hardware Media Foundation H.264 encoders with MFTEnumEx and MFT_ENUM_FLAG_HARDWARE, then probe every required input/output type and ICodecAPI control. Enumeration alone is not a capability guarantee.
Require proven support for low-latency operation, runtime bitrate control, and explicit keyframe requests; reject that adapter instead of silently weakening the contract when a property is unavailable or read-only.
Request one H.264 Constrained Baseline, packetization-mode 1 stream, then inspect the emitted SPS and negotiated profile-level-id before accepting the path. Browser baseline interoperability does not guarantee a particular hardware MFT or 1080p60; test every target GPU/browser combination.

Audio, per-process WASAPI capture, WGC/DDA fallback, source selection, Electron, installers, updating, and cross-platform abstractions stay outside the first spike.

2026-08-20 Windows codec comparison

The target workstation exposes an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER. NVIDIA's published NVENC contract encodes H.264, HEVC, and AV1, but not VP8. The current Native canary instead fixes VP8 and asks WebCodecs for prefer-hardware; its code removes that preference when the capability check rejects it. The prior bounded run did reject the preferred configuration and continued with no-preference. One VideoEncoder and its first output callback therefore do not establish hardware encoding, and VP8 cannot use this GPU's NVENC engine.

Discord and the read-only Oopz 0.87.425 package inspection both make H.264 the smallest Windows hardware candidate. Discord publishes native OS/driver capture and encoding with hardware preferred and WebRTC transport. Oopz's package contains Agora screen-share integration, WGC/DXGI/D3D11 capture components, an H.264 Web viewer configuration, NVENC/QSV/AMF plus software codec paths, and an observable hardware-acceleration field. The inspection found one channel screen publication and no evidence of an application-owned per-viewer PeerConnection loop. That is consistent with a common publication, but static packaging cannot prove one physical encoder, the codec/profile selected for a real host, or actual GPU use.

The bounded WebCodecs H.264 run, its no-go result, and the hardware-only Media Foundation successor are owned by Native H.264 hardware decision spike. Do not recreate a codec ladder here. AV1 waits for the same physical-encode proof and the desktop/mobile Viewer decode matrix; compression efficiency alone cannot advance it.

Reproducibility anchors for the proprietary-package inspection, without copied code or user data:

Oopz data/app.so: SHA-256 462E081D03E49008AD8D64A032BD6396F0B97CDADBDF715F7C6810D081A714F8.
Oopz screen-viewer bundle screenShare/page/assets/index-C6S4n49C.js: SHA-256 1EAECD2C0DC332E5D2628047EE1BECB874C8130C2C383355EE313961EFC6E1CA.
Oopz agora_rtc_sdk.dll: SHA-256 66B8B34A57BA0EE9DCC6C516E2CC20F5F1EB5D35ED7150FDF37201A46BC8D4A0.

Pion Validation Route

Pion is the released-public-API validation route while the larger libwebrtc encoder-proxy experiment remains unbuilt. TrackLocalStaticSample owns one packetizer and writes through a TrackLocalStaticRTP that can bind to multiple PeerConnections, making encoded-payload fanout explicit.

This certainty moves more responsibility into the application. Pion's default interceptors provide NACK, RTCP reports, statistics, and transport-wide feedback, but an external encoder still needs explicit send-side bandwidth estimation, aggregation of both edge targets, encoder bitrate control, PLI handling, and bounded RTP/RTX queues. The already bounded #23/#28 ladder uses the same minimum-edge safety rule and must not invent a custom SRTP, ICE, or congestion protocol. A product route must follow ADR-0007 instead.

Fixed-HIGH Product-Wiring Attempt

ADR-0006 retains one narrow candidate: fixed VP8 1280x720@30 with a 3 Mbps ceiling, one WebCodecs encoder object, at most two independent Pion legs, the strict ordinary signaling wire, unmodified viewers, read-only feedback, and no audio or automatic LOW. This is a proposed test boundary, not current product behavior or hardware-encoder evidence.

The 2026-08-20 local delivery checkpoint rebased that candidate onto the then-current access contract, screener-v2, with site-access Cookie authentication, explicit private-link creation, fragment-only Viewer grants returned to the local Host, and STUN-only ordinary ICE. Native creation alone requests a fixed 300-second provisional room. It remains random and memory-only even with SQLite configured: the current Host session suppresses the reclaim deadline, its generation-matched disconnect resets the five-minute window, the ordinary transient room TTL still caps the room, and restart drops it. A pre-auth connection or authentication failure gets one same-room/token/client-generation retry without a second room POST. SQLite remained v2 and ordinary Web creation was unchanged. This paragraph records only the dated candidate boundary; current source and production are owned by status, executable senders are outside the current release, and no new work is authorized against v2. Android stop/capture-failure cleanup keeps the established signaling socket until its single-thread teardown sends abandon-room and then performs a normal close; pending-work cancellation only blocks callbacks and cancels active HTTP. No ACK is awaited. A provisional room whose WebSocket handshake never opened remains bounded by the existing 300-second reclaim window. HTTP statuses, Cookie attributes, create-room responses, Host authentication, and ignored Viewer evidence are strict and bounded; errors retain only fixed categories. Focused Go and TypeScript checks pass. The overbroad unused framework stays deleted. npm run probe:native-one-viewer is the remaining local-only, optional Native research runner; it is not part of Web acceptance, routine full checks, or an automatic Actions workflow.

The probe requires an explicit Chrome executable and uses a task-local Go executable or task-specific PATH; neither path is committed. It retains only bounded booleans, capped counters, and ordinal/generation identities. One frozen signaling socket, PeerConnection/video track, bridge generation, and Pion edge must own all positive evidence. Cleanup is fail-closed and completes bounded process-tree exit, closed-port checks, exact system-Temp profile validation, reparse-point rejection, and deletion before a pass can be reported. Pure tests cover deadline expiry, cross-connection evidence, bridge replacement, cleanup-before-pass, profile bounds, and deletion failure.

The current correctness proof is one complete Chrome 151/Windows loopback with an in-memory room, peer assistance off, and no production or SQLite access. The Sender produced positive decoded/source-RTP evidence without a fatal or encoder error; one Viewer authenticated, completed offer/answer/ICE, received media, and advanced decoded and rendered frames at 1280x720. Sampled elapsed time and an asynchronously refreshed Pion delta are diagnostics only and do not decide the proof. This establishes one-Viewer functional delivery, not performance, hardware use, public-network behavior, a second Viewer, FIFO promotion, packaging, or release acceptance.

The retained implementation advances Pion time from positive adjacent source timestamp deltas rather than assuming EncodedVideoChunk.duration is present or authoritative. Equal or decreasing timestamps fail closed. Focused timeline and real /media tests cover capture jitter, decode, fanout, positive source RTP, and bounded fatal reporting for unexpected post-config bridge closure. The probe treats candidates before the first offer and one development-only pre-offer control-socket replacement as the same test generation; after an active offer, connection or bridge replacement still fails closed. WebCodecs, Chromium remote-debugging, Windows cleanup, and pinned Pion sources were rechecked 2026-08-20.

ADR-0006 owns the remaining staged two-Viewer, third-Viewer waiting/FIFO, network, package, and release stop lines; this research does not redefine them.

Stacked Validation Ladder

These Draft PRs are deliberately stacked research, not six product features:

PR / commit	Bounded gate	Result
#16 / `5b09f0a`	One Pion RTP write across two independent transports	Equivalent payload reached two transport-local SSRCs. There was no encoder or browser.
#18 / `80f65d0`	Synthetic WebCodecs VP8 chunks through Pion to two Chrome receivers	One encoder object produced 120 inputs/outputs and both browsers decoded; this was an offline fixture, not physical-encode evidence.
#22 / `8121b69`	Continuous 320x180@30 live bridge for about 12 seconds	One encoder object sent 360 chunks; each viewer decoded and presented 331 frames, with encoder/native queue peaks of one.
#23 / `eb9aabe`	Merged PLI/FIR policy, min-of-two target policy, and independent 512-packet NACK/RTX state	Policy traces passed, but stock Pion GCC plus negotiated RTX failed with `unknown ssrc: 2001`. This composition is no-go.
#25 / `a6c3456`	No-RTX primary-SSRC replay under one controlled leg loss	Leg 1 emitted one NACK and one replay with fresh TWCC, then decoded another 278 frames; leg 2 stayed clean. This can distort RTCP loss accounting.
#28 / `aad560e`	Live two-leg stock-GCC target applied to the same encoder object, then one controlled loss	The bounded gate passed. Both estimates happened to be 600 kbps, so heterogeneous-estimate behavior remains unproven.

Final Live Gate Evidence

The sole authorized #28 browser run used Headless Chrome 151 and Pion WebRTC v4.2.18 on Windows amd64. It ran 1280x720@30 for 12.972 seconds with 390 scheduled inputs and 390 outputs from one VideoEncoder object. The encoder queue peaked at 1/4, the native queue at 1/8, and the WebSocket buffer at 12,467/524,288 bytes; no encoder or socket drop occurred.

Both legs returned real Transport-CC before target selection. Their final stock GCC estimates were both 600 kbps. The coordinator took the minimum, published one 600 kbps target, and the host serialized flush(), configure() on the same encoder object, and a forced key frame to acknowledge the change from the initial 1.2 Mbps ceiling.

After acknowledgment, the boundary dropped one leg-1 primary packet. Chrome sent one NACK and Pion replayed the same primary RTP identity with a new TWCC sequence; leg 2 recorded no drop, NACK, or replay. Both viewers decoded another 359 frames after the shared recovery marker. This is a go result only for the bounded live target plus primary-SSRC recovery candidate.

Product Quality Direction

PR #28 establishes only that one live VideoEncoder object accepted one conservative feedback-derived reconfiguration while feeding two transports. It does not establish heterogeneous feedback behavior and must not evolve into a room-wide minimum controller.

ADR-0007 keeps stock WebRTC GCC per direct/peer path. Each SFU path starts with a HIGH ceiling and built-in BWE selects from one shared HIGH+LOW pair. App evidence is diagnostic and does not select routes or ordinary layers. LOW may already be active, and idle stop depends on the resource gate. The active representation/layer limit is two, never one per viewer; the the host follows the configured non-server outbound media-copy capacity; the two-edge result in this experiment is a historical configuration, not a fixed policy.

If a qualified hardware/power-efficient LOW path is unavailable or its measured encoder/CPU/GPU game or upload load is unacceptable, LOW fails closed for weak paths while healthy paths keep HIGH. LOW may remain active when that measured budget passes; stopping it while idle is an optimization.

The app does not derive topology eligibility from representation state. Viewer quality requests are authenticated, rate-limited, deduplicated diagnostic advice and do not form a composite score. UA and device identity do not participate.

A native relay forwards the selected encoded packets and must not decode or re-encode them. An ordinary non-scalable representation cannot be forwarded into a second quality; the bounded choices are a second encode, SVC, or transcoding. ADR-0007 statically closes current Web P2P simulcast and Web/LiveKit SVC as cross-path shortcuts, but keeps pinned LiveKit exactly-two simulcast with built-in SFU bandwidth adaptation as the priority runtime candidate. SFU BWE does not change topology. Explicit subscriber quality is next if built-in selection fails; manual sender activation follows if always-on cost fails; custom/native dual encode is last. A future native SVC decision may reopen only with an explicit hardware encoder contract, at most two decodable layers, one encoded output reused across direct/peer/SFU, independent path selection, and the real game/power matrix. Media Capabilities or RTCStats power-efficiency signals are diagnostics, not hardware proof; an unestablished path stays disabled rather than silently using software. Future dual-tree/striped distribution may reduce two-copy host upload toward one copy plus redundancy, but does not block dual-representation work.

Simulcast does not change this native proof boundary: one sender may negotiate HIGH/LOW, but separate direct PeerConnections have no portable shared-encode contract and inactive API state is not physical resource proof. ADR-0007 and Realtime Quality Adaptation own the static standard-path results and any future native reopen gate. This path still requires measured per-representation traffic/resources and cannot bypass #28's stock-GCC/RTX stop line.

2026-08-21 Evaluation Packaging Boundary

The current source now has one Windows x64 evaluation-package path. It reuses the existing Go build and MSVC helper build, places the two executables beside each other, embeds the exact Git revision, adds an internal SHA256SUMS.txt, and publishes the ZIP with an adjacent SHA-256 file. screener-sender.exe --version is the non-interactive package smoke. This does not add an installer, Electron, auto-update, signing, a bundled server, codec matrix, or release.

The manual-only workflow uses the official windows-latest image, whose current manifest includes VSWhere, the x64 Visual C++ tools, and Windows 11 SDK, and the official immutable actions/upload-artifact@v7 path with missing-file failure, zero second-stage compression for the precompressed ZIP, and seven-day retention. It has no push or pull-request trigger and is dispatched only at an explicitly authorized Native release-package boundary; it is not a Web acceptance gate. GitHub requires authentication to download the resulting artifact. Sources were checked 2026-08-21.

The linked-binary audit covers 23 modules: coder/websocket is ISC; the 16 Pion modules are MIT; google/uuid, wlynxg/anet, and the four golang.org/x modules are BSD-style. Every linked module exposes a recognized root license file. The packager derives the list from go list -deps, copies those exact files plus the Go toolchain license, and fails if a linked module has no license file. No GPL/AGPL reference or proprietary Oopz code enters the package.

The project distribution license remains undecided. The Actions artifact is therefore labeled evaluation-only and grants no project redistribution right; GitHub Release publication remains blocked on the license decision. This bounded trial artifact does not change ADR-0006's product No-Go status.

Product Stop Line

The stock Pion GCC plus negotiated RFC 4588 RTX composition is no-go-stock-pion-gcc-rtx; do not work around it with a custom pacer, congestion controller, interceptor fork, or private transport. The no-RTX primary-SSRC path stays research-only because it sacrifices retransmission- specific receiver statistics and can distort RTP/RTCP loss accounting.

No stacked PR is connected to Screener's product path, capture path, or audio path. Before product consideration, a target native sender must still prove one physical encoder invocation on representative hardware, live PLI/FIR-to-encoder control, heterogeneous downstream estimates, bounded burst and sustained loss, audio/A-V synchronization, reconnect isolation, browser diversity, lifecycle, and sustained CPU/GPU, memory, latency, quality, and upload measurements. A third host edge, custom RTP/SRTP, or a custom congestion-control framework remains out of scope. The #28 minimum-of-two policy is also out of scope for product code; retaining its evidence does not retain its policy. Ordinary Web and Native peer ICE stays STUN-only. The sole application fallback remains ADR-0005's Host publication with exact SFU/UDP subscriptions; Native research adds no transport candidate.

Primary Sources And License Boundary

The current Go candidate directly uses Pion (MIT) and coder/websocket (ISC). The evaluation package generates and verifies notices for the Go runtime and all linked direct/transitive dependencies. Choose the project license before a formal release or redistribution grant. libwebrtc/H.264 remains a separate future route requiring its own third-party notice and patent/licensing review. No source code from these projects was copied into Screener.

25 KiB Raw Blame History