WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

The problem seems to be that they are decompressing video in Chromium and then sending the uncompressed video somewhere else.

A more reasonable approach would be to have Chromium save the original compressed video to disk, and then use ffmpeg or similar to reencode if needed.

Even better not use Chromium at all.

They’re scraping video from VC services, so only have access to the frame buffer.

Presumably those services use Chromium codecs and perhaps standard WebRTC, so they have access to the encoded data stream as well (via JavaScript injection or patching Chromium to dump the data).