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There's a big opportunity in the rtc space for someone to build a lib/service that "just works". We built a probject that started with peerjs for the prototype

There's a big opportunity in the rtc space for someone to build a lib/service that "just works". We built a probject that started with peerjs for the prototype and then moved to simple-peer for the prod version, but it's still a nightmare in webrtc land. All sorts of random errors and quirks, connection glaring, reconnect handling, etc. This is still very much an unsolved problem.

mattanimation 6y ago
true that. Every time I've used WebRTC it ended up way more complicated then it initially set out to be. Pion is actually pretty nice though
- Sean-Der 6y ago
  Thanks :) if there is anything I can do to make it better I would love to hear!
Sean-Der 6y ago
I worked at a job that was trying to do this. The issue they ran into was money. * Signaling wasn't a big money maker. You are just exchanging small blobs. * We spent a lot of time helping people debug their networks/explaining WebRTC and making SDKs. I enjoyed the work, but didn't feel like it scaled well. * Adding features caused major paralysis. Everyone wanted different authentication or different signaling patterns etc...
- qeternity 6y ago
  Signalling is actually the easy part, as I'm sure you know. It was everything else that you take for granted when doing voice comms: auth, handshakes, reconnects, etc. They all seem really simple, until you actually sit down to do it yourself. Mad props to the FaceTime crew...nobody else has mastered seamless RTC the way they have.
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Would you be open to having a brain dump chat? I want to deliver some WebRTC solutions in the near future but haven’t done this before, would be awesome to just pick someone’s brain about what happens after release :)
  - Sean-Der 6y ago
    Of course! Email me at sean@pion.ly and happy to help however I can.
    - corytheboyd 6y ago
      Emailed!
  - kwindla 6y ago
    Sean and Pion are awesome! Definitely talk to Sean. I'm happy to talk to you, too. I do a lot of "let's just talk about real-world things you'll encountering building video features" calls. You don't need to be a Daily (my startup) customer or even plan to be one. I'm kwindla at daily dot co.
    - corytheboyd 6y ago
      Thank you so much! Will shoot you an email as well to keep in touch
corytheboyd 6y ago
> glaring I’m curious, did you implement the perfect negotiation logic from the webrtc spec? I’m working on my own WebRTC applications and was hoping that would at least solve the glaring problem in practice
kwindla 6y ago
We're a YC company that tries to do exactly that: WebRTC-based features that "just work", with APIs for everything you might want to do with real-time media: https://www.daily.co/ As you noted below, the signaling itself is the easy part. The long tail of RTCPeerConnection-related corner cases, bandwidth management, analytics and debugging real-world user experience, scaling usage both horizontally and geographically, building features like recording, scaling meeting size beyond 4 participants, optimizing for specific use cases, dealing with browser/platform quirks ... we've tried to make life easy/(ier) for developers in all of those areas.
- digitaltrees 6y ago
  We use daily in production for a health care app and it is amazing.
  - loevborg 6y ago
    +1, I can also highly recommend daily
- triangleman 6y ago
  I don't know if it's me but your site took several seconds to load, maybe 10 seconds, and it was totally blank while it loaded.
j1elo 6y ago
There's still a lot of room in the space of WebRTC troubleshooting tooling, precisely due to the complexity inherent of "doing it right". I know well about the mess of difficult to debug technologies that form WebRTC... and on top of that you'll want monitoring, recording, reconnection logic when things go wrong. Of course, add the ability to seamlessly scale when there are lots of users joining a call. The list goes on and on even for a seemingly simple service that "just works"!! I've been maintaining and improving the oss Kurento server for several years now (https://www.kurento.org/ https://www.kurento.org/), and the kind of issues that users find is crazy. A slight misconfig in an intermediate proxy can cause random issues very hard to track down. Shameless plug: We're now building OpenVidu (https://openvidu.io/ https://openvidu.io/) on top of Kurento, to provide some of these features. This is a tool that in turn (pun intended) eases writing videoconference services. Most people looking into starting their own WebRTC app from scratch with Kurento, would be better served by OpenVidu!

mattanimation 6y ago

true that. Every time I've used WebRTC it ended up way more complicated then it initially set out to be. Pion is actually pretty nice though

Sean-Der 6y ago
Thanks :) if there is anything I can do to make it better I would love to hear!

Sean-Der 6y ago

I worked at a job that was trying to do this. The issue they ran into was money. * Signaling wasn't a big money maker. You are just exchanging small blobs. * We spent a lot of time helping people debug their networks/explaining WebRTC and making SDKs. I enjoyed the work, but didn't feel like it scaled well. * Adding features caused major paralysis. Everyone wanted different authentication or different signaling patterns etc...

qeternity 6y ago
Signalling is actually the easy part, as I'm sure you know. It was everything else that you take for granted when doing voice comms: auth, handshakes, reconnects, etc. They all seem really simple, until you actually sit down to do it yourself. Mad props to the FaceTime crew...nobody else has mastered seamless RTC the way they have.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Would you be open to having a brain dump chat? I want to deliver some WebRTC solutions in the near future but haven’t done this before, would be awesome to just pick someone’s brain about what happens after release :)
- Sean-Der 6y ago
  Of course! Email me at sean@pion.ly and happy to help however I can.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Emailed!
- kwindla 6y ago
  Sean and Pion are awesome! Definitely talk to Sean. I'm happy to talk to you, too. I do a lot of "let's just talk about real-world things you'll encountering building video features" calls. You don't need to be a Daily (my startup) customer or even plan to be one. I'm kwindla at daily dot co.
  - corytheboyd 6y ago
    Thank you so much! Will shoot you an email as well to keep in touch

corytheboyd 6y ago

> glaring I’m curious, did you implement the perfect negotiation logic from the webrtc spec? I’m working on my own WebRTC applications and was hoping that would at least solve the glaring problem in practice

kwindla 6y ago

We're a YC company that tries to do exactly that: WebRTC-based features that "just work", with APIs for everything you might want to do with real-time media: https://www.daily.co/ As you noted below, the signaling itself is the easy part. The long tail of RTCPeerConnection-related corner cases, bandwidth management, analytics and debugging real-world user experience, scaling usage both horizontally and geographically, building features like recording, scaling meeting size beyond 4 participants, optimizing for specific use cases, dealing with browser/platform quirks ... we've tried to make life easy/(ier) for developers in all of those areas.

digitaltrees 6y ago
We use daily in production for a health care app and it is amazing.
- loevborg 6y ago
  +1, I can also highly recommend daily
triangleman 6y ago
I don't know if it's me but your site took several seconds to load, maybe 10 seconds, and it was totally blank while it loaded.

j1elo 6y ago

There's still a lot of room in the space of WebRTC troubleshooting tooling, precisely due to the complexity inherent of "doing it right". I know well about the mess of difficult to debug technologies that form WebRTC... and on top of that you'll want monitoring, recording, reconnection logic when things go wrong. Of course, add the ability to seamlessly scale when there are lots of users joining a call. The list goes on and on even for a seemingly simple service that "just works"!! I've been maintaining and improving the oss Kurento server for several years now (https://www.kurento.org/ https://www.kurento.org/), and the kind of issues that users find is crazy. A slight misconfig in an intermediate proxy can cause random issues very hard to track down. Shameless plug: We're now building OpenVidu (https://openvidu.io/ https://openvidu.io/) on top of Kurento, to provide some of these features. This is a tool that in turn (pun intended) eases writing videoconference services. Most people looking into starting their own WebRTC app from scratch with Kurento, would be better served by OpenVidu!