WebRTC Weekly Issue #647
ONVIF picks WebRTC, WordPress goes peer-to-peer, and rtcStats gets dark mode
This week WebRTC keeps showing up inside standards that have nothing to do with video calling. ONVIF - the surveillance industry’s interoperability body - just named it as the mandatory transport in their new cloud video draft. WordPress dev tooling picked it for peer-to-peer browser connections. At 15 years old, WebRTC is less a platform and more a building block other specs reach for.
⭐ Tsahi’s Pick
ONVIF releases Profile V draft for cloud video without vendor lock-in (SDM Magazine)
WebRTC is about 15 years old now, and it keeps getting pulled into standards bodies that have been around far longer. We saw it with Matter 5.0 in the smart-home world, and now ONVIF - the surveillance and physical-security standards body - has made WebRTC the mandatory transport in their Profile V draft for cloud video. WebRTC is not winning because it’s the obvious choice for video calling - it’s winning because it’s a well-understood, browser-native transport that established standards bodies trust enough to build on.
📰 This Week in WebRTC
Google Summer of Code 2026 - meet this year’s Jitsi projects (Jitsi) - five GSoC contributors are working inside the Jitsi stack this summer. An interesting selection
Mediasoup DataChannels: when replacing WebSockets actually makes sense (Jesús Leganés-Combarro ‘piranna’) - a detailed walkthrough of when mediasoup data channels actually beat WebSockets - as well as when you shouldn’t use it
We deployed the same video platform on five clouds and timed it: 5 minutes to 20, and the slow ones… (OpenVidu) - when you let Claude (or another AI?) run the deployment and then write the post for it
Profile V – Frequently Asked Questions (ONVIF) - ONVIF’s new draft spec standardizes cloud video transport with WebRTC as a primary, mandatory path. They also define H.264 as the video codec
WordPress Playground: remote access over WebRTC (WordPress Developer Blog) - Playground now lets you open your local dev environment from another device over a direct browser-to-browser WebRTC connection
Call quality is invisible until a customer leaves (No Jitter) - Tsahi on how contact centers lose sight of WebRTC quality because they don’t own or control the networks and devices of the agents
📣 Sponsor
WebRTC Live is a monthly webinar series featuring industry guests (WebRTC.ventures)
Join us for the July 22 episode, “Using Voice AI and Avatars to Scale Live Training” with guest Andrés Rincon.
📢 Releases
GStreamer 1.28.5 - some WebRTC improvements and refinements in this release
Red5 Pro v15.6.0 - adds AV1 codec support, though unknown if it also works in the WebRTC protocol for Red5
OpenVidu 3.8.0 - mediasoup is now a fully supported RTC engine with all previous limitations resolved; OpenVidu can now leverage it end-to-end
rtcStats v1.8: dark & light themes and richer overview statistics - dark mode, a redesigned overview with min/max, P95, and standard deviation; streams timelines now anchor to call start