About MIME codecs

When we use MSE (Media Source Extension) for developing a media player, the api MediaSource.isTypeSupported needs extra information about the media file. We will need a MIME codec string like

video/mp4; codecs="avc1.64001E, mp4a.40.2"
audio/mp4; codecs=mp4a.40.42
video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis"

see More web format codec. see Wiki

It consists of the MIME type part and codecs string part.

MIME type supported

Media files would have text(VTT subtitle), image, audio and video files, so it is supposed to recognize them like below。

text/
image/
audio/
video/

And codecs string like below.

av01.P.LLT.DD[.M.CCC.cp.tc.mc.F]
cccc[.pp]* (Generic ISO BMFF)
mp4v.oo[.V] (MPEG-4 video)
mp4a.oo[.A] (MPEG-4 audio)
avc1[.PPCCLL] (AVC video)
hev1.P.T.Ll.Bb (HEVC video)
and other no spec using codec name

How to use

How to know the the mime type and codecs. For those who have installed nodejs, you may run npx like below.

npx ffmime <mediafile>

For those who have installed the ffmpeg libraries and want to build from source, run

git clone https://github.com/junka/ffmime.git
cd ffmime
make mime
./ffmime mediafile

wasm

We can use it in javascript code.

npm install ffmime

Then in the code, like in electron we can get the MIME type and codecs string. The returned string can be used for the MSE API MediaSource.isTypeSupported().

import {GetMimeCodecs} from 'ffmime'
const mimeType = await GetMimeCodecs(filename)
console log(mimeType)

To build wasm from source,

docker build -f Dockerfile --output package .

wasm js files are built into package directory and then you can publish and import the package. Only muxer and demuxer configured as enabled in ffmpeg, so we could have a minified wasm binary which is less than 2MB size. This is much more reasonable than a full ffmpeg. Here we only need a probe for the mimetype and codecs string.

Extra note

Some format could have a side effect.

• For example, a mkv format could output video/x-matroska; codecs="avc1.640029, mp4a.40.2" which is not supported by Chrome, but you can replace x-matroska with mp4 to make it pass the check of the Chrome.

• However, when the mimetype is video/mp4, if the mp4 container box is NOT fragmented, the media file would not be decoded right by MSE.

• A mp3 format could output audio/mpeg; codecs=85 which 85 is the codec id. For use in browser, just strip the codecs. audio/mpeg will be supported by the browser.

• Raw pcm can hardly probed without any hint. so it will return empty string.