Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure • Hacker News Board

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#21

Post by hootener » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:10 PM UTC

jc4p wrote: post #4

I was really excited by the title but this seems a bit lacking. I've done a lot of WebRTC work -- we currently use Google Hangouts everywhere at Stack Exchange for internal team communication, but the 15 person cap hurts some bigger all-hands calls or our weekly remote parties. I don't think the hardest part of WebRTC is transcoding or TURN servers (what Twilio seems to be offering), multiplexing is where all the com…

I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. WebRTC is really great for a handful of people. Implementation using some third party was never the difficult part, but scale was and is still a total nightmare.

I'd love to see WebRTC done by a service provider in a highly scalable way, so I can stop relying on RTMP (and typically embedding a flash player to support it) to deliver live streaming audio/video on a large scale.

As someone who has only leveraged WebRTC through third party providers (e.g., OpenTOK, etc.), I have no idea the complexity of what I'm asking for. Perhaps it's boil the ocean difficult, but it sure would be nice to have!

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#22

Post by RobSpectre » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:15 PM UTC

marquis wrote: post #3

A tech question for Twilio: can you manipulate the SDP object?

Good question - one of Twilio Video's aim is to take a lot of the signaling headache away. We do expose the PeerConnection, but not the SDP object.

What would you want to use it for?

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#23

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:17 PM UTC

jgrowl wrote: post #20

jc4p wrote: post #4

I was really excited by the title but this seems a bit lacking. I've done a lot of WebRTC work -- we currently use Google Hangouts everywhere at Stack Exchange for internal team communication, but the 15 person cap hurts some bigger all-hands calls or our weekly remote parties. I don't think the hardest part of WebRTC is transcoding or TURN servers (what Twilio seems to be offering), multiplexing is where all the com…

Thought I'd mention jitsi ( https://jitsi.org ) since it seems to aim to do what you are wanting. I am not sure how many connections it practically supports currently though.

Jitsi, licode, janus ... there are a whole list of them, open-source. Unfortunately they conflate the MCU feature with the SDP exchange feature. Which may or may not suit your application. For instance if you want to connect clients in anything but an everyone-in-the-room-hears-everyone-else model, they don't support anything else.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#24

Post by higherpurpose » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:20 PM UTC

Is ORTC still being implemented in the next version of WebRTC? I've read that ORTC needs a greatly simplified implementation (if you forget about all the other legacy stuff in WebRTC, such as support for the phone networks).

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#25

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:21 PM UTC

RobSpectre wrote: post #22

marquis wrote: post #3

A tech question for Twilio: can you manipulate the SDP object?

Good question - one of Twilio Video's aim is to take a lot of the signaling headache away. We do expose the PeerConnection, but not the SDP object. What would you want to use it for?

Extra authentication; new roles; address filtering (recognize VPN path etc); bundling control...

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#26

Post by kolencherry » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #23

jgrowl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought I'd mention jitsi ( https://jitsi.org ) since it seems to aim to do what you are wanting. I am not sure how many connections it practically supports currently though.

Jitsi, licode, janus ... there are a whole list of them, open-source. Unfortunately they conflate the MCU feature with the SDP exchange feature. Which may or may not suit your application. For instance if you want to connect clients in anything but an everyone-in-the-room-hears-everyone-else model, they don't support anything else.

Bingo. You hit the nail on the head. To efficiently do large conferences, you need to both multiplex audio and video at the media server layer and have a concept of active speakers.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#27

Post by kolencherry » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:25 PM UTC

Are there any plans for Twilio to integrate this with the SIP side of things (e.g. Twilio providing a media server to enable WebRTC clients to communicate with SIP clients and also call out to traditional phone clients?)

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#28

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:27 PM UTC

kolencherry wrote: post #26

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jitsi, licode, janus ... there are a whole list of them, open-source. Unfortunately they conflate the MCU feature with the SDP exchange feature. Which may or may not suit your application. For instance if you want to connect clients in anything but an everyone-in-the-room-hears-everyone-else model, they don't support anything else.

Bingo. You hit the nail on the head. To efficiently do large conferences, you need to both multiplex audio and video at the media server layer and have a concept of active speakers.

You can write your app to use one of those MCUs for large conference, and accomplish the audio/video multiplexing via those MCUs. But only in a logical full-mesh configuration. So for instance 100 people listening to 6 panel members but not one another - not easy. Not unless the clients cooperate and carefully trim the streams for audience peers (fail to subscribe to them), just leaving the panel streams. It becomes complicated very fast.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#29

Post by jallmann » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:28 PM UTC

hootener wrote: post #21

jc4p wrote: post #4

I was really excited by the title but this seems a bit lacking. I've done a lot of WebRTC work -- we currently use Google Hangouts everywhere at Stack Exchange for internal team communication, but the 15 person cap hurts some bigger all-hands calls or our weekly remote parties. I don't think the hardest part of WebRTC is transcoding or TURN servers (what Twilio seems to be offering), multiplexing is where all the com…

I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. WebRTC is really great for a handful of people. Implementation using some third party was never the difficult part, but scale was and is still a total nightmare. I'd love to see WebRTC done by a service provider in a highly scalable way, so I can stop relying on RTMP (and typically embedding a flash player to support it) to deliver live streaming audio/video on a large s…

I've been working on exactly this. It's not horribly difficult if you've got experience building media servers, but it is tedious, because WebRTC has so many more moving parts than eg, RTMP, and the tooling is not very mature yet. Not to mention WebRTC itself is still a bit in flux (eg, ORTC).

Unfortunately, until IE and Safari support WebRTC, then RTMP is really still the best way to do low-latency streaming and video chat in the browser. Additionally, most RTMP server software will scale out to hundreds of clients out of the box.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#30

Post by Everhusk » Tue, Apr 14, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

It would be useful to know which browsers are supported for javascript developers. I am using OpenTOK for Real-time WebRTC at the moment which works great, but it doesn't have safari support. Would definitely consider switching if this worked on all browsers!