The HTMLVideoElement interface provides special properties and methods for manipulating video objects. It also inherits properties and methods of HTMLMediaElement and HTMLElement.

The MediaDevices.getUserMedia() method prompts the user for permission to use one video and/or one audio input device such as a camera or screensharing and/or a microphone. If the user provides permission, then the returned Promise is resolved with the resulting MediaStream object. If the user denies permission, or media is not available, then the promise is rejected with PermissionDeniedError or NotFoundError respectively. Note that it is possible for the returned promise to neither resolve nor reject, as the user is not required to make a choice.

The MediaRecorder() constructor creates a new MediaRecorder object.

While the WebRTC specification is relatively stable, not all browsers have fully implemented all of its features. In addition, some browsers still have prefixes on some or all WebRTC APIs. While you can manually code around these issues, there is an easier way. The WebRTC organization provides on GitHub the WebRTC adapter to work around compatibility issues in different browsers' WebRTC implementations. The adapter is a JavaScript shim which lets your code to be written to the specification so that it will "just work" in all browsers with WebRTC support. There's no need to conditionally use prefixed APIs or implement other workarounds.

This article introduces the protocols on top of which the WebRTC API is built.

The Media Capture and Streams API, often called the Media Stream API or the Stream API,  is an API related to WebRTC which supports streams of audio or video data, the methods for working with them, the constraints associated with the type of data, the success and error callbacks when using the data asynchronously, and the events that are fired during the process.

The MediaRecorder interface of the MediaRecorder API provides functionality to easily record media. It is created by the invocation of the MediaRecorder() constructor.

The MediaRecorder.onpause event handler (part of the MediaRecorder API) handles the pause event, allowing you to run code in response to the media recording being paused.

The appendWindowEnd property of the SourceBuffer interface controls the timestamp for the end of the append window, a timestamp range that can be used to filter what media data is appended to the SourceBuffer. Coded media frames with timestamps wthin this range will be appended, whereas those outside the range will be filtered out.

The mode property of the SourceBuffer interface controls whether media segments can be appended to the SourceBuffer in any order, or in a strict sequence.

The <audio> and <video> elements provide support for playing audio and video media without requiring plug-ins. Video codecs and audio codecs are used to handle video and audio, and different codecs offer different levels of compression and quality. A container format is used to store and transmit the coded video and audio (both together, the case of a video with a soundtrack). Many combinations of codecs and container formats exist, although only a handful of these are relevant on the Web.