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Show HN: Multiparty WebRTC video chat
- fersho311 13y agoThis demo Uses opentok for video streaming and fire base for presence, state changes, and chat.
- automobill 13y agonice project
- calinet6 13y agoRoom: hackernews
- christiangenco 13y agoOh wow, this is so interesting. I've had this nebulous mental image of what the average HNer looks like when reading comment responses, but now I can actually see them, and none of them look remotely like what I was picturing. They're not lofty hyper-articulate hackers with fancy setups working remotely on a super cool island, they're in their poorly-lit rooms with messy hair getting work done. You all look strangely like me o_O
- hamburglar 13y agoYou obviously weren't in there when I was, broadcasting from my skull-shaped office whose walls are shark tanks.
- songzme 13y agoLink to source code: https://github.com/songz/OpenTokRTC https://github.com/songz/OpenTokRTC
- xauronx 13y agoConnected for a second... but I'm in a room full of people quietly working. Looks very cool though. I've been using OpenTok for a while, and it's looking cooler/faster/cleaner every time I see it.
- lstepniewski 13y agoCorrection: Link to API code to connect to OpenTOK, not source code as you would expect...
- makmanalp 13y agoNice job, guys! This could seriously put skype and webex (ughhh) out of business.
- est 13y agomeanwhile google hangouts still requires a plugin. Even in Chrome.
- nicklovescode 13y agoLooks awesome! I need exactly this, but it needs to work for Safari/Chrome for the latest iPad. Any ideas?
- songzme 13y agoChrome on iOS devices does not support webrtc (unfortunately). One solution is to use OpenTok's iOS SDK and build an iOS app to make it work on native apps
- changdizzle 13y agoWe offer a native iOS SDK that has interop with the web!
- douglasisshiny 13y agoworks well on my nexus4.
- matthewcford 13y agoShame the are revising their pricing to remove free 1:1 chats.
- changdizzle 13y ago1:1 chats that go through our servers will be charged, if you've built before Aug 31st all 1:1 is free!
- matthewcford 13y agoTrue, however if you want to use the WebRTC API it'll be charged, even 1:1.
- changdizzle 13y agoIf you've started building before 8/31, all 1:1 is free, group will cost money Even if you haven't, all p2p 1:1 traffic is free
- sillysaurus2 13y agoThe reason this matters is because free 1:1 gives you a growth vector. Without it, you won't grow nearly as large. And growth is the all-important metric, not revenue.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoFortunately there are already a handful of signaling servers. Running an ICE server is trivial. It takes literally nothing to get a WebRTC chat up and running. If you multiplex in the browser, doesn't take any more work to have multi-peer conferencing. It you want to be nice to your user and pull apart the streams and combine and multiplex on the server, that takes more work and is totally worth paying for.
- brickcap 13y agoVery cool.
- brickcap 13y agoHow did you implement the filters though?
- dm2 13y agohttp://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/css/filters/index.html http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/css/filters/index.html http://www.soundstep.com/blog/experiments/jsdetection/ http://www.soundstep.com/blog/experiments/jsdetection/ http://webcamtoy.com/ http://webcamtoy.com/
- songzme 13y agocss 3 filters, Here's a quickie: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/say-hello-to-css3-filters/ http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/say-he...
- brickcap 13y agoThanks for that link
- PleaseBeSerious 13y agoAny ability to record?
- brickcap 13y agoI dont think it is in built but screen capture should work.
- changdizzle 13y agoNo recording yet, but we're looking to have an archiving beta by the end of the year
- tootie 13y agoSimilar to http://appear.in http://appear.in, but no screensharing. Being open source is a big plus.
- singular 13y agoSeems to be down :( getting a heroku Application Error
- bedspax 13y agocool.
- klaussilveira 13y agoI had the chance to meet the OpenTok guys at TNW Latam this year and they are amazing developers. The service is great and cheap... i'm dying to try something with it as soon as i have some time on my hands.
- changdizzle 13y agoThanks, it was great meeting you too!
- songzme 13y agoHaha I remember you Klaus! You were demoing your startup that focuses on teaching others how to code and I learned so much from you. Rock on!
- lelandbatey 13y agoWell this is fun : ). I'm "dudeInBlue" in the chat.
- changdizzle 13y agodudeinblue, you should have talked more! we were haroldandkumar here at the tokbox office
- pmx 13y agoI (dudeinwhite) attempted to talk but I kept bugging out :(
- lelandbatey 13y agoHaha, that's awesome! I was unable to talk since I was in a public CS lab, but I would've if I could've. You guys seemed cool :)
- pmx 13y agoIndeed! (dudeinwhite)
- brianbreslin 13y agoLiveNinja.com is using this for webcasts.
- fersho311 13y agoIve used liveNinja and its awesome!
- ilaksh 13y agoIsn't the point of WebRTC to avoid dependence upon a company like OpenTok?
- songzme 13y agoThe point of WebRTC is to allow real time communication in the browser. You can do this via p2p data streaming without any services but you are limited to p2p and its shortcomings (like maximum of 2 users, blocked ports, firewall, etc). By using a service like OpenTok, you can augment your WebRTC experience because you well be able to stream to thousands of users, tunnel through blocked ports, and generally more firewall friendly. Great question tho.
- ilaksh 13y agoI didn't know that webrtc was limited to two users. If it is how does opentok get around that? My understanding of webrtc was that it uses UDP so it can get around firewalls and such by using STUN or things like that. So my experiments with webrgc used an open source library that was using some Google sever and the author of the library's server for making connections and also firebase. I think k the guys name was muaz Kahn or something. Anyway I think all you really need servers for is the initial connection establishment. And there are free servers up providing that. So if webrtc truly has a limitation on 2 peers then I doubt opentok actually has any magic patch for webrtc.. maybe they have a script that creates a bunch of Iframes or something.
- songzme 13y agoTo use webrtc with more than 2 users you would need a webrtc streaming server that receives an incoming webrtc packet and sends it to all listening connections. Like a pub-sub model
- pfisch 13y agoWe use opentok a lot and are developing a system for it. My biggest issue with it is reliability and incorrect behavior on the opaque opentok side of the libraries. iOS support on the iphones seems unreliable right now and has a bunch of unspecified silent errors when you init a subscriber from a new stream. Even with the javascript libraries we sometimes find ourselves in situations where the best solution is to programmatically refresh the page because the opentok errors become unrecoverable. The javascript side is better though. However, if tokbox.com is blocked by the firewall right now it does not seem to attempt to route around it. Right now I think opentok is still one of the best webrtc offerings in the market but that is mainly because of the mobile support race which they seem to be losing ground on. My one big request is to make the ios sdk less opaque. Just give us the source of the ios sdk. If it is going to be broken and have a bunch of issues that sucks but as long as I can start digging around into the sdk and fix my issues I care much less. As it stands right now it does not support iphone 4 and below and currently it is not showing the subscriber video on an iphone 5 even though the code works perfectly on ipads. Since the sdk is a blackbox and is the source of the silent errors all I can do is throw a bunch of weird hacky try/catch solutions around it. TL;DR - Release the sourcecode for the ios sdk because it is buggy and the developers who use it need to route around the bugs.
- aoberoi 13y agoDev Evangelist from TokBox here. I'm sorry you had difficulties working with OpenTok. Our technology is bleeding edge and is moving terrifically fast so a few bugs are a tradeoff thats worth the ability to be able to innovate in the market. What this means for us as a business is that we've doubled down on our support talent and infrastructure, all of which maintain quite a high level of responsiveness to issues that come in (our premium support customers seem just as happy to have us as we are to have them). I'm curious if you've used any of those channels and if your issues went unanswered - if there's a leak in those pipes that would be very important to us to fix. Lets address those silent errors when initializing subscribers, please email support@tokbox.com. Open sourcing the technology isn't really an option for us, and its not just because the technology we are working on is our IP. Laying the infrastructure and process conventions for accepting patches outside the company while driving a growing internal engineering team is non-trivial. Making a repo public isn't some magical pill that will help you get to your answer faster, there's a lot of planning and documentation needed to make open source work. If anything I'm confident that the number of inbound support queries would increase because of questions about the code itself. This would slow down the response time for developers that truly have an issue we should address quickly. An open source project could work under these conditions but for a team of our limited size it would only slow things down. That being said we love the community of developers that contribute to open source and we have been trying to do more of it ourselves. Our framework integrations are OSS (PhoneGap plugin, Titanium module, more to come), and we're eternally grateful to participate in projects like Google's webrtc implementation. TL;DR: Open sourcing the project would slow the development down. If you need support, we're all ears and want to make that experience the best it can be (and the forums are public so you can hold us accountable).