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I've been working with WebRTC for a year now building Sqwiggle (https://www.sqwiggle.com https://www.sqwiggle.com) - In my experience I can tell you two things,

by tommoor 13y ago

I've been working with WebRTC for a year now building Sqwiggle (https://www.sqwiggle.com https://www.sqwiggle.com) - In my experience I can tell you two things, - It's not really possible to go entirely peer-to-peer as many networks do not allow for this communication to happen. You would have constant issues with calls not being able to connect. Some centralised service is required for signaling, STUN and TURN which costs money and uses significant amounts of bandwidth. - Even if you do go peer-to-peer with WebRTC the quality would still be improved by going through a central server (less upstream bandwidth required) [edit: when more than 2 participants] If you're interested in helping to tackle these problems, we're hiring ;-)

wwwtyro 13y ago
> Even if you do go peer-to-peer with WebRTC the quality would still be improved by going through a central server (less upstream bandwidth required) Why is that?
- tommoor 13y ago
  I should have prefaced that with when there are more than 2 participants... as you would only need to upload your audio/video stream once.
- saykou 13y ago
  yeah that makes no sense, unless there's is more then on participant, in that case a full peer to peer would have to upstream (n-1) streams
- viraptor 13y ago
  1. Possible saving on bandwidth for the clients if they know good codecs A and B respectively, so they can't use them between eachother, but a transcoding third party can help. 2. This doesn't help with the amount of bandwidth used, but sometimes due to peering (that VoIP companies really care about) you can get lower delay going via them rather than directly. This is not very common, but it happens (especially if your broadband provider is your VoIP provider for example). Maybe the poster above had another reason for it too. There's loads of edge cases in the ITSP world.
AndrewDucker 13y ago
Will IPv6 help with peer-to-peer?
viraptor 13y ago
> STUN and TURN which costs money and uses significant amounts of bandwidth. TURN does, but not STUN. STUN's just for address discovery and many VoIP providers allow anyone to use theirs. But agreed - STUN on its own can fix only some connection. Anyway, I think IPv6 can't be here soon enough. That would allow many improvements in the p2p networks!
- darklajid 13y ago
  As someone with native IPv6 connectivity (from a braindead/broken/cheap/stupid ISP, behind Dual Stack Lite, which causes a bunch of other problems) I .. don't believe that IPv6 is - being generally available soon enough to matter (ever tried accessing your home connection via IPv6 from your mobile? There's no usable workaround that I've found so far and I don't see networks switching to IPv6 anytime soon) - easy to migrate to (privacy concerns, lots of things to relearn, existing hard- and software WILL break - as my ISP provided cable modem does every three days when my prefix is renewed -> Reboot/reconnect or you're silently offline forever) The idea is great. I was a fan of the technology in theory. Living with IPv6 at home for ~2 month now I'm considering to cancel my contract _because of issues due to the IPv6 migration_. That aside, ignoring my anecdotal troubles and my personal disappointment with the way IPv6 is (not..) introduced around me: How would IPv6 help anyway? Just because you're having a globally routable address for all your machines probably doesn't mean that you want them to be directly exposed to the internet? Wouldn't you still need (rather: want) to punch a hole through the firewall?
  - viraptor 13y ago
    Regarding the last part, that's where technology like upnp cones into play. There are already some ideas out there: http://tools.ietf.org/search/draft-bnss-v6ops-upnp-01#section-2.3 http://tools.ietf.org/search/draft-bnss-v6ops-upnp-01#sectio... Also once you know the address that doesn't use NAT, you could just use the STUN idea and just and the data from both ends at the same time. Regarding ISP problem... have you tried contacting the support to replace the router? If it's their device they should just handle it like any other issue. If they refuse then it may be a problem with the "braindead/broken/cheap/stupid ISP" rather than any technology.
sixQuarks 13y ago
This looks like a really cool product, but there's one thing that bothers me about this. I don't like the fact that the camera takes a picture every 8 seconds. I feel like I'm being monitored. Is this a concern that others have brought up as well? Is there an option to turn that feature off, but still make yourself available instantly?

by tommoor 13y ago

wwwtyro 13y ago

> Even if you do go peer-to-peer with WebRTC the quality would still be improved by going through a central server (less upstream bandwidth required) Why is that?

tommoor 13y ago
I should have prefaced that with when there are more than 2 participants... as you would only need to upload your audio/video stream once.
saykou 13y ago
yeah that makes no sense, unless there's is more then on participant, in that case a full peer to peer would have to upstream (n-1) streams
viraptor 13y ago
1. Possible saving on bandwidth for the clients if they know good codecs A and B respectively, so they can't use them between eachother, but a transcoding third party can help. 2. This doesn't help with the amount of bandwidth used, but sometimes due to peering (that VoIP companies really care about) you can get lower delay going via them rather than directly. This is not very common, but it happens (especially if your broadband provider is your VoIP provider for example). Maybe the poster above had another reason for it too. There's loads of edge cases in the ITSP world.

AndrewDucker 13y ago

Will IPv6 help with peer-to-peer?

viraptor 13y ago

> STUN and TURN which costs money and uses significant amounts of bandwidth. TURN does, but not STUN. STUN's just for address discovery and many VoIP providers allow anyone to use theirs. But agreed - STUN on its own can fix only some connection. Anyway, I think IPv6 can't be here soon enough. That would allow many improvements in the p2p networks!

darklajid 13y ago
As someone with native IPv6 connectivity (from a braindead/broken/cheap/stupid ISP, behind Dual Stack Lite, which causes a bunch of other problems) I .. don't believe that IPv6 is - being generally available soon enough to matter (ever tried accessing your home connection via IPv6 from your mobile? There's no usable workaround that I've found so far and I don't see networks switching to IPv6 anytime soon) - easy to migrate to (privacy concerns, lots of things to relearn, existing hard- and software WILL break - as my ISP provided cable modem does every three days when my prefix is renewed -> Reboot/reconnect or you're silently offline forever) The idea is great. I was a fan of the technology in theory. Living with IPv6 at home for ~2 month now I'm considering to cancel my contract _because of issues due to the IPv6 migration_. That aside, ignoring my anecdotal troubles and my personal disappointment with the way IPv6 is (not..) introduced around me: How would IPv6 help anyway? Just because you're having a globally routable address for all your machines probably doesn't mean that you want them to be directly exposed to the internet? Wouldn't you still need (rather: want) to punch a hole through the firewall?
- viraptor 13y ago
  Regarding the last part, that's where technology like upnp cones into play. There are already some ideas out there: http://tools.ietf.org/search/draft-bnss-v6ops-upnp-01#section-2.3 http://tools.ietf.org/search/draft-bnss-v6ops-upnp-01#sectio... Also once you know the address that doesn't use NAT, you could just use the STUN idea and just and the data from both ends at the same time. Regarding ISP problem... have you tried contacting the support to replace the router? If it's their device they should just handle it like any other issue. If they refuse then it may be a problem with the "braindead/broken/cheap/stupid ISP" rather than any technology.

sixQuarks 13y ago

This looks like a really cool product, but there's one thing that bothers me about this. I don't like the fact that the camera takes a picture every 8 seconds. I feel like I'm being monitored. Is this a concern that others have brought up as well? Is there an option to turn that feature off, but still make yourself available instantly?