Microsoft adds preview H.264/AVC support in Edge browser on Windows 10 build 14352

Back in April 2016, Microsoft provided an update roadmap for real-time communication (RTC) in Windows 10’s Edge browser. In particular, the company made note of upcoming support for the H.264/AVC codec, which is the standard in the RTC community. Now, Microsoft is announcing support for H.264/AVC in Edge as of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14352.

The company outlined what’s new in a post on the Edge Dev blog:

Today we’re excited to announce preliminary support for H.264/AVC support in the real-time communications (RTC) stack in Microsoft Edge, as initially promised in our April roadmap update. You can preview this feature in Windows Insider Preview builds starting with EdgeHTML 14.14352 by navigating to about:flags and checking “Enable experimental H.264/AVC support.” This change helps enable interoperable video communications solutions across browsers for basic 1:1 calling scenarios.

This preview release adds the following for H.264/AVC support in our RTC stack:

• Support for packetization-mode 1, per RFC 7742
• Support for Constrained Baseline Profile with levels up to 4.2 (i.e. with profile-level-id=42c02a)
• Support for the absolute send time header extension (abs-send-time)
• Support for Picture Loss Indication (PLI), per RFC 4585

More work remains to be done to enable full support for H.264/AVC in Edge, and Microsoft won’t be stopping development with the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Check out the blog post for a bit more information and, if you’re a developer, you can grab some particularly technical details as well.