Live data from Hacker News

Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

twilio.com

41–50 of 106 posts

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#42
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…

Yeah, I don't think that it is boil the ocean difficult but there is definitely some complexity there. I have been working on a scala WebRTC server, but I am not sure if it would really work at a large scale

Here was my basic approach:

An end user creates a PeerConnection with a Publisher node and starts sending a MediaStream using a string identifier.

Then another user can create a PeerConnection with a Subscriber node using the same identifier.

The Subscriber node then makes a request to the Publisher to make another PeerConnection to a Registry that exists on the same node as the Subscriber.

The replicated MediaStream can then be attached to the Subscriber.

Since the replicated MediaStream is in a Registry, any additional subscribers can attach the MediaStream on the same node as well.

The code is a huge mess but it is here (The scala server is in the media directory): https://github.com/jgrowl/livehq

There is a vagrant file that brings up the whole system at the root of the project (using docker). I have not tested it recently on anything other than ubuntu.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#43

Although it's great to see Twilio branching out into this space, with their recent product releases they do seem to be losing focus on their original Twilio Voice product. Compared to other prodividers their prices really aren't conpetitive, but Twiml is so much more flexible and easier to use than VoiceXML. What to do? :/

Rob from Twilio here - appreciate the feedback. Have you had an opportunity to check out TaskRouter yet? We released it a few weeks ago - definitely my favorite recent product that works with Twilio Voice: https://www.twilio.com/taskrouter

I saw this a while back and then forgot to go back and check it out. This looks interesting. Thanks for posting.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#44

WebRTC needs p2p for group chat, and it'd be unstoppable. Currently using Hello for one-on-one conferencing, but need something that both scales and doesn't require a centralized server. Considering Skype had this ten years ago, it's obviously doable.

WebRTC already has p2p support for group chat. appear.in is one example of an implementation.

The main limitation is that upload bandwidth scales linearly with the number of people in the group chat. But that's often OK for up to 10 or so people.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rob from Twilio here - confirming this is an accurate description. Each peer in the conversation has a connection to every other peer.

Is there any chance of scaling WebRTC any better than that?

Absolutely - we have a lot of ambition around where we want to take Twilio Video in the future.

This is only the first step.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#47

I did a lot of testing of a few WebRTC platforms last summer for a product idea that we had. I came to the conclusion that on mobile phones, WebRTC video is not yet usable. Even with just audio on a cellular network, call quality started deteriorating after a few minutes on every platform that I tried. Video without a WiFi signal was hopeless. I discussed this with an WebRTC expert, and the problems are partly with W…

Looking forward to hearing more about this on your website, That'll Never Work© News.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#48

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?)

I wrote this http://www.siptowebrtc.com/ that uses our SIP interfaces and PSTN to connect to our WebRTC client. I'm going to put the code up on Github after I clean it up but I'd be happy to talk through how it works. andrew at twilio dot com.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#49

Although it's great to see Twilio branching out into this space, with their recent product releases they do seem to be losing focus on their original Twilio Voice product. Compared to other prodividers their prices really aren't conpetitive, but Twiml is so much more flexible and easier to use than VoiceXML. What to do? :/

Rob from Twilio here - appreciate the feedback. Have you had an opportunity to check out TaskRouter yet? We released it a few weeks ago - definitely my favorite recent product that works with Twilio Voice: https://www.twilio.com/taskrouter

Interesting; however in my opinion I'd redesign that page. Having a lot of the information behind the interactive scrolling will cause it to be lost. Personally, and I know a lot of others, just scroll the page and look for the relevant information in paragraph form. Much easier to digest. This implementation forces me to stay on the page and is a bit frustrating.

Re: Twilio Video – Real-time WebRTC video infrastructure

#50

Although it's great to see Twilio branching out into this space, with their recent product releases they do seem to be losing focus on their original Twilio Voice product. Compared to other prodividers their prices really aren't conpetitive, but Twiml is so much more flexible and easier to use than VoiceXML. What to do? :/

Rob from Twilio here - appreciate the feedback. Have you had an opportunity to check out TaskRouter yet? We released it a few weeks ago - definitely my favorite recent product that works with Twilio Voice: https://www.twilio.com/taskrouter

Thats a pretty cool use of scroll to explain the product. Any details on how you guys built that? Is it completely custom or did you use some known JS/CSS lib/tricks?
Post reply on HN