title: B-frames in real-time video streaming
body: <p>Are B-frames useful (compared to P-frames) in real-time video streaming?</p>
  
  <p>My intuition suggests no, as the benefit of B-frames over P-frames is that they may reference frames occuring in the future. </p>
  
  <p>Therefore if a video is streaming in real-time, it won't have access to future reference frames (and it would cause the stream to pause until it had access to those frames). </p>
  
  <p>Hence B-frames are no more useful than P-frames (and can be less useful if they do in fact reference future frames)</p>