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Hey HN! Excited to share Unnamed SFU, it's creator just sent out an email asking people to try it out. It is designed for one to many communication (conferenci

Hey HN! Excited to share Unnamed SFU, it's creator just sent out an email asking people to try it out. It is designed for one to many communication (conferencing/webinars)! It does one thing and does it REALLY well. The minimalism helps concentration/lowers barrier of entry a lot. Now that WebRTC is getting easier to build things with, I hope to see a lot more special purpose software like this. It is nice having heavyweight video solutions, but attacking the problem from different angles I think is going to bring a lot of innovation as well :) ----- Dear colleagues, A friend of mine just did a three-hour first-year lecture over my unnamed SFU with 12 students. The students didn't switch on their camera (except during the break), the lecturer was streaming three flows: audio, video, and lecture slides. The total amount of network traffic oscillated between 4Mbps and 10Mbps (380kps to 800kbps for each receiver), which indicates that the congestion control algorithm is working as designed. The CPU load oscillated between 10% and 20% (of a $5/month VPS), which is more than in previous tests, I suspect that the CPU accounting of the VPS I'm renting is not accurate. Neither the lecturer nor the students (first years, non-STEM) had any problems with the software. One student reported problems with the video, which went away after a while. The students initially complained about the primitive UI (« au début, ça fait un peu peur »), then got used to it (« mais après, ça va »). I think the software is ready for a test at larger scale, say, a seminar with a hundred listeners or so. If anyone is organising a seminar and is willing to take the risk, please let me know. (You are welcome to forward this mail.) https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/sfu/ https://www.irif.fr/~jch/software/sfu/ Best, -- Juliusz ----- It uses a library I work on Pion WebRTC (https://github.com/pion/webrtc https://github.com/pion/webrtc) the Go implementation of WebRTC. If you aren't familiar with WebRTC, now is a great time to learn it! It was designed for conferencing, but everyone realized it can do a lot of amazing things! It is used for things like WebTorrent, Tor, Mixer.com etc... A good jumping off point to see what can be built is github.com/pion/awesome-pion or a talk I gave recently that is targeted at people who have never done anything with WebRTC before! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdgoOrJH8ok&feature=youtu.be&t=989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdgoOrJH8ok&feature=youtu.be...

kop316 6y ago
Hello, So I am confused, you are asking us to clone the git repository, but the closest thing to a license I see is: // Copyright (c) 2020 by Juliusz Chroboczek. // This is not open source software. Copy it, and I'll break into your // house and tell your three year-old that Santa doesn't exist. This copyright notice means I am not touching it. I would recommend editing your license so I can understand the terms come with using it.
- Sean-Der 6y ago
  The library that does all the heavy lifting is Open Source https://github.com/pion/webrtc https://github.com/pion/webrtc there are also other SFUs using Pion * https://github.com/pion/ion https://github.com/pion/ion * https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls * https://github.com/fox-one/mornin.fm https://github.com/fox-one/mornin.fm You can also see a bunch of other projects https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion Sorry I am not the author of the linked software. I made a mistake, I thought it was Free Software from my conversations with the author I missed that notice :(
  - kop316 6y ago
    Hello, Sorry, got mixed up, it looked like you were the author.
parhamn 6y ago
Awesome! I was just playing with pion(&ion)! Very cool tech. Curious what you use it for and if it has much scale in production? I almost wish there was something between ion (very distributed) and pion (very low-level), this might be a good example to include in the pion examples. Light single node SFU, which I can imagine you can add a routing layer to shard scale pretty easily. Thanks for all your work on the tool! Got up and running very quickly (still looking into some MediaInfo issues).
- Sean-Der 6y ago
  Thank you so much! I don't use it myself for work, I just work on Pion because I think it is an important problem to solve :) One company uses Pion for media distribution (not ingestion). I don't know where they are at on the project, but the traffic was ~15 million viewer! They have a bunch of custom infrastructure and what not, but 'at scale' is being done with Pion :) I would love to have that Pion example! If you get a chance you should open an issue, and would love to throw out ideas. I am always looking for ways to make it better, I was just unaware that this would be helpful :(
  - parhamn 6y ago
    Thats awesome! Thanks, I'll probably send a PR soon myself. Do you have a pion chat as well? I couldn't get on the one linked. Can point out some things as I play with the implementation.

kop316 6y ago

Hello, So I am confused, you are asking us to clone the git repository, but the closest thing to a license I see is: // Copyright (c) 2020 by Juliusz Chroboczek. // This is not open source software. Copy it, and I'll break into your // house and tell your three year-old that Santa doesn't exist. This copyright notice means I am not touching it. I would recommend editing your license so I can understand the terms come with using it.

Sean-Der 6y ago
The library that does all the heavy lifting is Open Source https://github.com/pion/webrtc https://github.com/pion/webrtc there are also other SFUs using Pion * https://github.com/pion/ion https://github.com/pion/ion * https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls * https://github.com/fox-one/mornin.fm https://github.com/fox-one/mornin.fm You can also see a bunch of other projects https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion Sorry I am not the author of the linked software. I made a mistake, I thought it was Free Software from my conversations with the author I missed that notice :(
- kop316 6y ago
  Hello, Sorry, got mixed up, it looked like you were the author.

parhamn 6y ago

Awesome! I was just playing with pion(&ion)! Very cool tech. Curious what you use it for and if it has much scale in production? I almost wish there was something between ion (very distributed) and pion (very low-level), this might be a good example to include in the pion examples. Light single node SFU, which I can imagine you can add a routing layer to shard scale pretty easily. Thanks for all your work on the tool! Got up and running very quickly (still looking into some MediaInfo issues).

Sean-Der 6y ago
Thank you so much! I don't use it myself for work, I just work on Pion because I think it is an important problem to solve :) One company uses Pion for media distribution (not ingestion). I don't know where they are at on the project, but the traffic was ~15 million viewer! They have a bunch of custom infrastructure and what not, but 'at scale' is being done with Pion :) I would love to have that Pion example! If you get a chance you should open an issue, and would love to throw out ideas. I am always looking for ways to make it better, I was just unaware that this would be helpful :(
- parhamn 6y ago
  Thats awesome! Thanks, I'll probably send a PR soon myself. Do you have a pion chat as well? I couldn't get on the one linked. Can point out some things as I play with the implementation.