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H.265 (HEVC) not published/sent via WebRTC — Chrome supports it, Edge does not

Yashraj Singh 0 Reputation points
2026-05-04T18:52:41.1133333+00:00

Microsoft Edge does not publish (send) H.265/HEVC video codec in WebRTC streams, even on hardware that supports HEVC encoding. Google Chrome supports H.265 publishing in WebRTC. This creates an interoperability gap for video streaming applications.

Expected Behavior

Edge should be able to negotiate and publish H.265 video in WebRTC peer connections, consistent with Chrome's behavior and the hardware capabilities of the device.

Actual Behavior

When attempting to publish an H.265 stream via WebRTC in Edge, the codec is either:

  • Not included in the SDP offer, or
  • Rejected/not negotiated successfully

The same application and hardware works correctly in Chrome, which successfully publishes H.265.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Open a WebRTC-based application that supports H.265 publishing (e.g., using RTCPeerConnection with H.265 codec preference set via RTCRtpSender.setParameters() or setCodecPreferences()).
  2. Attempt to start a video stream with H.265 selected.
  3. Observe the SDP offer — H.265 is absent or the negotiation fails.
  4. Repeat in Chrome — H.265 is successfully negotiated and published.

Environment

  • Browser: Microsoft Edge (Version 147.0.3912.98 (Official build) (64-bit))
  • Edge Version: [Version 147.0.3912.98 (Official build) (64-bit)]
  • OS: [Windows 11]
  • Hardware: [GPU/SoC — relevant for HW encode support]
  • Chrome Version (working)

Additional Context

This is a blocker for video analytics and real-time streaming pipelines that rely on H.265 for its superior compression efficiency over H.264, especially relevant for multi-stream datacenter and edge deployments.

References

Microsoft Edge | Microsoft Edge development
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1 answer

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  1. Thomas4-N 14,790 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2026-05-05T10:46:33.14+00:00

    Hello Yashraj Singh,

    Thanks for the detailed write-up — this looks like an expected gap rather than a bug on your end.

    WebRTC H.265 send/receive landed in upstream Chromium behind the WebRtcAllowH265Send / WebRtcAllowH265Receive feature flags, and Google flipped them on by default starting Chrome 136, which is why publishing works there. Edge is Chromium-based but hasn't enabled those flags by default yet, so H.265 simply isn't advertised in the SDP offer regardless of HEVC hardware or the HEVC Video Extensions (those only cover <video> playback, not WebRTC). There's an open tracker on the official Microsoft Edge Explainers repo where others are reporting the exact same behavior with RTSP cameras, MediaMTX, vdo.ninja, etc., and it's still unassigned with no ETA: MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers #1273.

    As an unofficial thing to try in the meantime, you can launch Edge from the command line with msedge.exe --enable-features=WebRtcAllowH265Send,WebRtcAllowH265Receive and see if the codec shows up in your offer.

    For an actual product change, the best path is to file it on the Edge Feedback Hub (... menu > Help and feedback > Send feedback) and add a like to the GitHub issue above — that's where the Edge team tracks WebRTC codec asks.

    Hope this clears up what's going on, and let me know how the flag attempt goes if you try it.

    Best regards,

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