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You could give Whereby [1] a try. I really liked it when it was named "appear.in" (that's now a completely different company), and used it for a bit, until my w

by gnud 6y ago

You could give Whereby [1] a try. I really liked it when it was named "appear.in" (that's now a completely different company), and used it for a bit, until my work switched to Teams. Whereby is, as far as I can tell, completely owned by a Norwegian registered company. 1: https://whereby.com https://whereby.com

tlear 6y ago
I really liked it, then they broke it on Safari. I still use it on Firefox, but it is annoying to switch just for using it
- odinho 6y ago
  We have used a lot of time making it work on Safari. And we continue to use quite substantial resources on it. Their webrtc implementation is quite new, and not as stable as Chrome and Firefox. And with new code comes new bugs. There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have a workaround for the first, and will be doing a fix for the second once we're reasonably sure it won't regress other browsers. Is it any of those issues you talk about? Or is it something else? (I'm not personally familiar with the Safari issues, btw, since I'm a Linux user, but I keep an eye on Firefox and Chromium-based browsers)
  - tlear 6y ago
    Safari does not crash, but audio is not working. I will play with it today and send bug report. Might help you guys out, I really like it otherwise
  - azinman2 6y ago
    If you have a good repro please send to https://bugreport.apple.com https://bugreport.apple.com or contact Apple Developer Support.
odinho 6y ago
A Whereby-developer here. It's awesome you recommend us. <3 But we'll also kill your CPU ^_^ You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution. I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument for our product. Video can be quite heavy.
- odinho 6y ago
  Actually, if you are using 4+ rooms, we will in many cases be better than some other webrtc services because we for these bigger rooms use a server in the middle to distribute all the streams. That will result in lower resource use. You only encode and send once, and it is distributed by the server. But if other webrtc kills CPU on 4 or less, we probably won't be much better. This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webrtc-insertable-streams/ https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
- unicornporn 6y ago
  Nice! Fellow Scandinavian here. Just some feedback. I think the free tier was a little unclear. > Free > Personal use > 1 user > 1 meeting room I have trouble reading this. It's as if I coule only create one room for myself without having anybody to chat with.
  - odinho 6y ago
    Hehe, I see. Yeah copy and marketing is hard. I think we should try to re-do that one. It's hard to get right for all cases. A p2p room can have 4 total people in it. So say you plus 3 concurrent guests, none of those guests need any account or "user". Indeed even you don't have to log in after you've created the room if you leave it unlocked. :)
- 6y ago
xyproto 6y ago
The name was probably too similar to another Norwegian company that is also named Appear.

by gnud 6y ago

tlear 6y ago

I really liked it, then they broke it on Safari. I still use it on Firefox, but it is annoying to switch just for using it

odinho 6y ago
We have used a lot of time making it work on Safari. And we continue to use quite substantial resources on it. Their webrtc implementation is quite new, and not as stable as Chrome and Firefox. And with new code comes new bugs. There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have a workaround for the first, and will be doing a fix for the second once we're reasonably sure it won't regress other browsers. Is it any of those issues you talk about? Or is it something else? (I'm not personally familiar with the Safari issues, btw, since I'm a Linux user, but I keep an eye on Firefox and Chromium-based browsers)
- tlear 6y ago
  Safari does not crash, but audio is not working. I will play with it today and send bug report. Might help you guys out, I really like it otherwise
- azinman2 6y ago
  If you have a good repro please send to https://bugreport.apple.com https://bugreport.apple.com or contact Apple Developer Support.

odinho 6y ago

A Whereby-developer here. It's awesome you recommend us. <3 But we'll also kill your CPU ^_^ You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution. I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument for our product. Video can be quite heavy.

odinho 6y ago
Actually, if you are using 4+ rooms, we will in many cases be better than some other webrtc services because we for these bigger rooms use a server in the middle to distribute all the streams. That will result in lower resource use. You only encode and send once, and it is distributed by the server. But if other webrtc kills CPU on 4 or less, we probably won't be much better. This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webrtc-insertable-streams/ https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
unicornporn 6y ago
Nice! Fellow Scandinavian here. Just some feedback. I think the free tier was a little unclear. > Free > Personal use > 1 user > 1 meeting room I have trouble reading this. It's as if I coule only create one room for myself without having anybody to chat with.
- odinho 6y ago
  Hehe, I see. Yeah copy and marketing is hard. I think we should try to re-do that one. It's hard to get right for all cases. A p2p room can have 4 total people in it. So say you plus 3 concurrent guests, none of those guests need any account or "user". Indeed even you don't have to log in after you've created the room if you leave it unlocked. :)
6y ago

xyproto 6y ago

The name was probably too similar to another Norwegian company that is also named Appear.