PSA: RTP datachannels are being deprecated in M88, intended removal in M90

[Harald Alvestrand]

For your information:

The never-standardized, low-performance alternative to SCTP-based datachannels called "RTP datachanels" is being removed from the WebRTC codebase.

Per today, Chrome M88 (currently canary, stable branch in January) will give a deprecation warning if you try to use the feature; in M90, we expect to remove the feature altogether.

If your code contains this line:

{'RtpDataChannels: true}

and you don't have any reason to preserve it, just remove that line (on both sides).

For more information, check this blink-dev thread:

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/7XWZ-J7HZHw

Harald

[Harald Alvestrand]

For your information:
This removal is now in the process of landing (in M90, which will show up in Canary).

[Harald Alvestrand]

Note: After the removal, if you have this particular construct in your code:

mandatory: { RtpDataChannels: false }

you have been using DTLS datachannels, and your business logic does not need updating, but you will still need to remove the construct, since Chrome no longer knows what "RtpDataChannels" means, and will therefore fail to create the PeerConnection, as per the rules of (non-standard) constraint arguments to the RTCPeerConnection constructor.

[Nasreddine Galfout]

Thank you for the update, I just removed it from my code.

also one question who is validating new questions on this group? I have asked two and they are not appearing (it is been 3 days!!!).

thank you again for the update.

[Harald Alvestrand]

Note: This was rolled back and revised; now the { RtpDataChannels: false } or { RtpDataChannels: true } will be ignored and only result in a deprecation notice. People using { RtpDataChannels: false } should notice no difference.

The revised version landed in Canary today.