Why

I wanted to decode the video coming from the tello drone

Thoughts

• I liked the projects that used emscripten, it's a cool approach. However, I wasn't able to make one work.

• For browser side, h264-converter is really well done, and works well, I like that it use the native video player and Media Source API

• I decide to make the API synchronous, because I was uncertain about how libav needs data feed to it, for example if data is out of order, can libav handle it? Is libav thread safe is it re-entrant? It wasn't documented well enough for me to easily know, so I used workers-threads and transfer lists is the consuming application. I thought about just using an internal queue to deal with those issues, but code complexity and testing requirements would be larger

Reference projects

Example from DJI

• https://github.com/dji-sdk/Tello-Python

Uses Browser Media Source API

• https://github.com/xevojapan/h264-converter

Web Asm and Android Source Code

• https://github.com/oneam/h264bsd
• https://github.com/udevbe/tinyh264
• https://github.com/mbebenita/Broadway
• https://github.com/gliese1337/h264decoder

Web Asm and libav ( the one from FFMPEG )

• https://github.com/shengbinmeng/ffmpeg-h264-dec

Pure javascript decoders

• https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg ( typically with ffmpeg transforming the data)

Native Node Libraries

• https://github.com/Streampunk/beamcoder

Spawn FFMPEG CLI ( typically with jsmpeg as viewer )

• https://github.com/johnwalicki/Node-RED-DroneViewer
• https://github.com/SovGVD/nodetello
• and many, many more

Other ( non JS )

• https://github.com/SMerrony/tello
• https://github.com/bgromov/TelloSwift