Supporting HEVC/H.265 videos in Electron

Question

Chrome/Electron don't normally support H.265 videos. I want the user to be able to play .mov files recorded by Apple devices in my app. How can I do this?

Possible approaches:

1. Use ffmpeg to transcode to H.264 in real-time, which will be resource intensive (not ideal)
2. Use WebAssembly to render the video in a <canvas> tag (not ideal)
3. Fork and manually add H.265 codec support to Chrome/Electron like https://github.com/AAAhs/electron-hevc (overkill)
4. Use a native module that renders the video in a <canvas> or BrowserView

Answer 1

We ran into a similar problem on our project where users from the iOS app were sending video messages to browser users. In the end, the easiest solution to the problem was to record the video manually in the h264 codec. An example from the documentation:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/cameras_and_media_capture/capturing_video_in_alternative_formats