Plan B

Plan B was an early proposal for handling multiple media sources in WebRTC SDP. It has been deprecated in favor of Unified Plan.

What Plan B was

Plan B used a single m= line per media type (one for all audio, one for all video) with multiple SSRC values within each m= line to represent different sources. This was Chrome's original approach to handling multiple media streams.

Why Plan B was replaced

Plan B was replaced by Unified Plan because:

  • It was not formally standardized by the IETF
  • Firefox and Safari implemented Unified Plan, causing interoperability issues
  • Unified Plan (one m= line per media track) is more flexible and aligns with the JSEP specification better
  • It complicated SFU implementations that needed to manipulate individual tracks

Chrome removed Plan B support, and all modern WebRTC applications should use Unified Plan exclusively. Legacy applications that relied on Plan B need to be migrated.

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Independent WebRTC analyst. 20+ years in telecom, 13 focused on WebRTC. Writes for developers and product teams who need to understand, not just implement, real-time communications.