6 ms·

One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone

42 points by dagingaa 12y ago

kirkus 12y ago
looks interesting...how are you storing user information?
plg 12y ago
how many people can join a video chat room at once?
- mva 12y ago
  "Video conversations with up to 8 people for free." Guess there will be a paid plan later which allows more people.
- return0 12y ago
  Since it's webRTC, the traffic is point-to-point, right? I guess you would need a good connection for more than a few clients.
rahimnathwani 12y ago
If two iPhone users, each behind a different NAT router with upnp enabled, use this to converse, will the media stream go directly between them, or via an appear.in server?
joeyspn 12y ago
> "As far as we know, we are one of the first services built purely on WebRTC to launch a dedicated iOS app" Hookflash [0] is a dedicated WebRTC iOS app that has been around since 2012 or so, and has a badass signaling layer with OpenPeer [1]... it also provides a SDK for building this kind of services in just a couple of hours. But then you also have OpenTok [2], that has been offering a similar iOS SDK with native WebRTC stack since late 2012 / early 2013, Mashme.tv [3] also in 2013, EasyRTC in mid 2013 [4], and hundreds of similar apps and solutions that are popping up like mushrooms (AddLive, etc...) and also use WebRTC in iOS.. What I'm trying to say is that WebRTC on iOS is already a quite crowded space, and the first services were deployed years ago (late 2012)... It would be more interesting to know what have you used in the signaling plane (websockets? pusher/pubnub? old sip?) how you have solved things like NAT traversal (TURN, ICE, Hole Punching, etc), or which solution you use for MCU... [0] http://hookflash.com/ http://hookflash.com/ [1] http://openpeer.org/ http://openpeer.org/ [2] http://tokbox.com/opentok/ http://tokbox.com/opentok/ [3] http://www.mashme.tv/ http://www.mashme.tv/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY
bruun 12y ago
For those interested, this was realized using the open-source Objective-C library from the WebRTC project. https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Ftalk%2Fapp%2Fwebrtc%2Fobjc https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%...
dang 12y ago
This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN. Please don't ring-vote posts (i.e. solicit upvotes). Besides setting off the ring detector, doing so will eventually get your account penalized.
macNchz 12y ago
This is great! I've really enjoyed using the appear.in web client...I do like the zero configuration aspect, but more importantly it performs dramatically better than Skype or Google Hangouts, in terms of both CPU usage and video quality over a busy connection. I've had many days where Hangouts was essentially unusable...stuttering, pixelated, and glitchy, but switching to an appear.in room worked nearly flawlessly, even with a group of several people. Looking forward to being able to use it on mobile!
eps 12y ago
Looks very tempting, but how do you make money?
- tbassetto 12y ago
  For now, I guess it's just surviving by being a subsidiary of the giant Telenor Group.
rahimnathwani 12y ago
This is awesome. You should update the FAQ page: "Currently iOS does not offer support in browsers for services like appear.in. We are working on exploring how we can make appear.in available for iOS. To be the first to be notified when it is available, you can sign up here (http://eepurl.com/N8Bez http://eepurl.com/N8Bez)."
- bruun 12y ago
  Well spotted, thanks :-)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
arb99 12y ago
the App store rules say: "Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex "Chat Roulette")" Once (if) this becomes popular it will have the chat roulette problem...
- evv 12y ago
  Actually, probably not. Snapchat used to have this "problem", and they were never kicked off the app store for it.
rasz_pl 12y ago
>not possible to get WebRTC-based services you can use previously discussed on HN jsmpeg to do MPEG streaming and decoding in pure javascript http://instant-webcam.com/ http://instant-webcam.com/

42 points by dagingaa 12y ago

kirkus 12y ago

looks interesting...how are you storing user information?

plg 12y ago

how many people can join a video chat room at once?

mva 12y ago
"Video conversations with up to 8 people for free." Guess there will be a paid plan later which allows more people.
return0 12y ago
Since it's webRTC, the traffic is point-to-point, right? I guess you would need a good connection for more than a few clients.

rahimnathwani 12y ago

If two iPhone users, each behind a different NAT router with upnp enabled, use this to converse, will the media stream go directly between them, or via an appear.in server?

joeyspn 12y ago

> "As far as we know, we are one of the first services built purely on WebRTC to launch a dedicated iOS app" Hookflash [0] is a dedicated WebRTC iOS app that has been around since 2012 or so, and has a badass signaling layer with OpenPeer [1]... it also provides a SDK for building this kind of services in just a couple of hours. But then you also have OpenTok [2], that has been offering a similar iOS SDK with native WebRTC stack since late 2012 / early 2013, Mashme.tv [3] also in 2013, EasyRTC in mid 2013 [4], and hundreds of similar apps and solutions that are popping up like mushrooms (AddLive, etc...) and also use WebRTC in iOS.. What I'm trying to say is that WebRTC on iOS is already a quite crowded space, and the first services were deployed years ago (late 2012)... It would be more interesting to know what have you used in the signaling plane (websockets? pusher/pubnub? old sip?) how you have solved things like NAT traversal (TURN, ICE, Hole Punching, etc), or which solution you use for MCU... [0] http://hookflash.com/ http://hookflash.com/ [1] http://openpeer.org/ http://openpeer.org/ [2] http://tokbox.com/opentok/ http://tokbox.com/opentok/ [3] http://www.mashme.tv/ http://www.mashme.tv/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY

bruun 12y ago

For those interested, this was realized using the open-source Objective-C library from the WebRTC project. https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Ftalk%2Fapp%2Fwebrtc%2Fobjc https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%...

dang 12y ago

This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN. Please don't ring-vote posts (i.e. solicit upvotes). Besides setting off the ring detector, doing so will eventually get your account penalized.

macNchz 12y ago

This is great! I've really enjoyed using the appear.in web client...I do like the zero configuration aspect, but more importantly it performs dramatically better than Skype or Google Hangouts, in terms of both CPU usage and video quality over a busy connection. I've had many days where Hangouts was essentially unusable...stuttering, pixelated, and glitchy, but switching to an appear.in room worked nearly flawlessly, even with a group of several people. Looking forward to being able to use it on mobile!

eps 12y ago

Looks very tempting, but how do you make money?

tbassetto 12y ago
For now, I guess it's just surviving by being a subsidiary of the giant Telenor Group.

rahimnathwani 12y ago

This is awesome. You should update the FAQ page: "Currently iOS does not offer support in browsers for services like appear.in. We are working on exploring how we can make appear.in available for iOS. To be the first to be notified when it is available, you can sign up here (http://eepurl.com/N8Bez http://eepurl.com/N8Bez)."

bruun 12y ago
Well spotted, thanks :-)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

arb99 12y ago

the App store rules say: "Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex "Chat Roulette")" Once (if) this becomes popular it will have the chat roulette problem...

evv 12y ago
Actually, probably not. Snapchat used to have this "problem", and they were never kicked off the app store for it.

rasz_pl 12y ago

>not possible to get WebRTC-based services you can use previously discussed on HN jsmpeg to do MPEG streaming and decoding in pure javascript http://instant-webcam.com/ http://instant-webcam.com/