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Python WebRTC binds libwebrtc M152, the engine inside Chrome, and exposes it through the W3C APIs you already know from the browser: RTCPeerConnection, data channels, tracks, WebCodecs frames, encoded transforms and stats. Talk to browsers, servers, SFUs and AI agents peer-to-peer, with no vendor service in between.

pip install wrtc

Coming from aiortc? Install wrtc[aiortc], change from aiortc to from webrtc.aiortc, and your code runs on Chrome's engine. See Migrating from aiortc.

const pc = new RTCPeerConnection();
const channel = pc.createDataChannel('chat');
channel.onopen = () => channel.send('Hello!');
channel.onmessage = (e) => console.log(e.data);
pc.onicecandidate = (e) => signaling.send(e.candidate);

const offer = await pc.createOffer();
await pc.setLocalDescription(offer);
signaling.send(pc.localDescription);

pc = webrtc.RTCPeerConnection()
channel = pc.create_data_channel('chat')
channel.on('open', lambda e: channel.send('Hello!'))
channel.on('message', lambda e: print(e.data))
pc.on('icecandidate', lambda e: signaling.send(e.candidate))

offer = await pc.create_offer()
await pc.set_local_description(offer)
signaling.send(pc.local_description)

Names follow the specifications in snake_case, and the camelCase originals (createOffer) work too. Enums compare equal to the strings of the specification, dictionaries are typed dataclasses, and everything is asyncio.

• 🌐 The real engine. ICE, DTLS, SCTP, congestion control, jitter buffers and codecs are Chrome's own, so interop with browsers is the browsers' interop.
• 🧩 The browser API. Written against the W3C specifications and tested with the web-platform-tests the browsers use.
• 🎞️ Every modern codec. VP8, VP9, AV1, H.264 and Opus. Hardware H.264 through VideoToolbox on macOS.
• ⚡ Native media path. Packets, decoding and encoding never touch Python. You see frames, not packets.
• 🖼️ Frames in, frames out. MediaStreamTrackProcessor, VideoTrackGenerator and MediaStreamTrackGenerator with WebCodecs' VideoFrame and AudioData, piped through WHATWG Streams.
• 🔐 Encoded transforms. RTCRtpScriptTransform and end-to-end encryption with SFrame.
• 🚀 Fast connection setup. WARP: DTLS 1.3, SNAP and SPED cut round trips off every new connection.
• 📦 pip install and go. Prebuilt wheels for Linux, macOS and Windows, CPython 3.9–3.15, including free-threaded 3.14t and 3.15t. Nothing else to install.
• 🏷️ Typed. Full type stubs, so your editor knows every interface, dictionary and event.

Against aiortc, it opens connections 7.3–8.3x faster, moves 7.7–14.6x more data through a data channel and spends less CPU on audio. See the benchmarks, which also measure Pion, libdatachannel and webrtc-rs.

The full comparison, and when another library is the better choice: Choosing a Python WebRTC library.

No H.264 implementation is built into the package. webrtc.openh264.install() downloads Cisco's binary on the user's device, under Cisco's patent license.

Prebuilt wheels for CPython 3.9–3.15, and free-threaded 3.14t and 3.15t, on:

Elsewhere pip builds it from sources with CMake and a C++20 compiler. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Complete programs, ready to copy. The ones with dependencies declare them inline, so uv run needs nothing installed.

• 🤖 Voice chat with OpenAI GPT-Live: talk to the model through your microphone and speakers. No server, just an API key.
• 📺 Live stream in the terminal: watch a public Janus stream as colored characters, with the audio on your speakers.
• 🔁 Echo peer: send the received video back in grayscale.
• 💾 Recorder: write received video and audio to files.

uv run https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MarshalX/python-webrtc/main/examples/janus_streaming.py

Pre-1.0: the API follows the specifications, but compatibility between versions isn't guaranteed until 1.0.0. See the changelog.

• 📖 Documentation: quickstart, guides and the API reference.
• 🐛 Report a bug or request a feature.
• 💬 Ask a question.

Contributions of any size are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md covers the development setup, building from sources, releasing and updating libwebrtc.

Python WebRTC is published under the BSD 3-Clause License.