A week about getting evidence instead of arguing from intuition. Philipp settled a codec argument with an actual dataset, eBPF probes will now tell you whether the network or your own server ate the packet, and an AI agent was handed nothing but a Grafana instance and asked what broke.
⭐ Tsahi’s Pick
Comparing WebRTC video codecs with a proper dataset (WebRTC Hacks)
Philipp pointed Claude at Microsoft’s Video Conferencing Dataset and at libWebRTC’s own video_codec_perf_tests harness, then let it run nearly 2,000 encode-decode passes. From there, he went down the quality rabbit hole of the various video codecs in WebRTC - ending up with some interesting insights. Here’s the thing - AI now lets us do virtually anything - the main question is what do we ask of it?
📰 This Week in WebRTC
How Oceaneering Runs Wowza Video Intelligence Framework on Live Subsea Video (Wowza) - nice use case where WebRTC and SRT are used in the same application
Safari Technology Preview 251 (WebKit Blog) - software fallback for AV1
Sovereign Video Conferencing for the Public Sector | Guide (Digital Samba) - the joys of sovereignty in 2026 as a buyer... or a seller
Using eBPF to Debug a WebRTC SFU: Finding Where Your Media Server Eats Packets (WebRTC.ventures) - using kernel-level probes to monitor/debug media servers
Debugging WebRTC with an AI agent and Grafana MCP (OpenVidu) - hooking up AI to Grafana to do troubleshooting of WebRTC sessions
Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT (dreamstation.systems) - a good writeup on how we got to be needing STUN, TURN and ICE - and why we’re stuck with them
📣 Sponsors
vCon: The PDF for Your Conversations
An open standard for transcripts, metadata, and consent. Learn vCon.
Meet Sipfront live on 23rd September
Discover the all-in-one voice and WebRTC testing platform trusted by NFON, Parloa and sipgate.
📢 Releases
mediasoup-client 3.23.0 released with RTP extension control API - fixing munging of non-standard extensions
✍️ This Week on BlogGeek.me
Who gets to build with MOQ - building on MOQ means writing the media stack yourself, congestion control included. Here’s who can actually pull that off, and who cannot