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Ask HN: WebRTC in the wild
I am looking into WebRTC and would be interested in a multi participant video implementation, but one thing that still puzzles me is how such a setup would work network-wise.
I can either have a true mesh network where all clients connect to each other or a centralised solution where a user's video stream is routed through a central server and the distributed to all clients. For the sake of simplicity I'll leave out any mixed forms for now.
In the former case I'd take a lot of bandwidth and traffic burden from the central server but would force each client to have [clients-1] connections and send the same stream to each of them. Encoding itself shouldnt be the big problem here but it would consume a lot more of bandwidth (and subsequently traffic) than when routed via the server.
In the latter case I'd avoid aforementioned drawbacks but not only would it increase the server's own traffic bill dramatically but it would also increase latency as everything would get sent to the server and then back to the clients.
Is there any commonly accepted approach or best practice for such a setup?
- explorigin 11y agoThis is still a bit of the wild-west. Now you understand why Skype originally had super-nodes. Most WebRTC chat implementations just limit the number of participants in a group. I think https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ is the exception but that just moves the limitations to the server. The good news is that if you just do audio, the bandwidth burden is pretty low.
- webrtc 11y agoThanks, I do realise that this is still a somewhat experimental area of technology but I wonder if there are approaches which can be ruled out straight away (for example: one argument, I could imagine, against the mesh network approach could be the duplicated stream burden on each client for the outgoing video; that might be too much especially for mobile clients). In this particular use-case it "unfortunately" shouldnt be audio-only.
- arnaudbud 11y agoMesh vs Mixer vs Router: https://webrtchacks.com/webrtc-beyond-one-one/ https://webrtchacks.com/webrtc-beyond-one-one/ Firefox multistream and renegotiation for Jitsi Videobridge: https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/webrtc/as/complete/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/category/webrtc/as/complete/ WebRTC has already started its industrial phase, the largest platform powered by WebRTC today is probably Facebook: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-silently-released-webrtc-video-calling-arnaud-budkiewicz https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-silently-released-we...