End users of game streaming services may experience increased latency, degraded quality, and battery drain when the browser switches from hardware to software decoding. Developers currently lack a way to detect this fallback in real time without prompting users for camera/mic permissions. In the past, developers used to rely on [`decoderImplementation`](https://w3c.github.io/webrtc-stats/#dom-rtcinboundrtpstreamstats-decoderimplementation) info, but as of Chromium M110+ it requires [`getUserMedia()`](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaDevices/getUserMedia) permissions. This is not ideal because the UI prompt is invasive, it’s excessive since it grants access to the camera and mic hardware when apps don’t need it, and it has a high failure rate since users have little reason to grant the permission unless they want to use voice chat. This gap makes it difficult to diagnose performance regressions and provide troubleshooting guidance.
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