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Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

blog.vline.com

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Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#2

Post by wc- »

I am in the process of evaluating options for embedded video chat in a webapp, vLine looks like another potential option (tokbox or OpenTok was the other service I had looked at) so I guess it's time to make some demos. My main points of comparison so far are ease of implementation and pricing.

The developer docs seem pretty easy to read so far, the nodejs example is nice. I'm impressed!

Edit - after some quick testing of the vLine video app, things seem to work fine in chrome, Firefox (stable and aurora) weren't showing online users, and safari (to my surprise because as far as I know safari doesn't support webrtc) showed users and chat worked but didn't support video calls.

Anyone know if Apple/Safari is planning to support WebRTC, or are they still sitting on the sidelines?

Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#3

Post by tomtheengineer »

wc- wrote: post #2

I am in the process of evaluating options for embedded video chat in a webapp, vLine looks like another potential option (tokbox or OpenTok was the other service I had looked at) so I guess it's time to make some demos. My main points of comparison so far are ease of implementation and pricing. The developer docs seem pretty easy to read so far, the nodejs example is nice. I'm impressed! Edit - after some quick testi…

Glad you like it!

We're always excited to see the new things that people build with our platform. The goal for our developer platform is to enable massive parallel experimentation with WebRTC so that people can create applications that are completely new and different from anything that exists today. We believe that by abstracting out the global server backend (and browser differences, etc.) from WebRTC there is a much larger market of developers that can build amazing things involving communication than ever before while only using JavaScript.

If you need any help along the way, don't be shy to contact us (@vlineinc, support@vline.com, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vline)

Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#4

Post by tomtheengineer »

wc- wrote: post #2

I am in the process of evaluating options for embedded video chat in a webapp, vLine looks like another potential option (tokbox or OpenTok was the other service I had looked at) so I guess it's time to make some demos. My main points of comparison so far are ease of implementation and pricing. The developer docs seem pretty easy to read so far, the nodejs example is nice. I'm impressed! Edit - after some quick testi…

Regarding your edit: Chrome and Firefox both support WebRTC out of the box. I'll look at the Firefox issue you mentioned (it should work).

Apple has participated in the WebRTC standard discussion (mainly pushing for H264 as the codec standard), but have kept silent on when/if they will release it in Safari.

Microsoft/Skype have been participating, but no word on when it will be in IE.

Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#5

Post by dinduks »

I've been looking for software to video chat without being locked in an ecosystem (especially Google Hangouts), and WebRTC seems to do the trick just fine while being completely decentralized. I just tried vLine and the quality is pretty good compared to Skype for example. Thank you vLine. :)

By the way, is HD video not supported or is the problem from my side?

Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#6

Post by tomtheengineer »

dinduks wrote: post #5

I've been looking for software to video chat without being locked in an ecosystem (especially Google Hangouts), and WebRTC seems to do the trick just fine while being completely decentralized. I just tried vLine and the quality is pretty good compared to Skype for example. Thank you vLine. :) By the way, is HD video not supported or is the problem from my side?

HD is supported, but we haven't enabled it yet for vLine link. We're waiting until we can do a better job detecting whether both ends can handle the HD stream, since the current WebRTC code doesn't do a great job of CPU load feedback (e.g., sending a 720p HD stream to a low-powered machine).

If you want to try out HD, register for a developer account at https://vline.com/developer/ and try the "Web Client". There is a drop-down menu on the "Video Call" button that lets you select HD (make sure to also choose that when you answer. The other option is to try GitTogether, which is just our Web Client with a GitHub login: https://gittogether.com.

Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#8

Post by tomtheengineer »

csense wrote: post #7

Does anyone have experience with self-hosted FOSS solutions for WebRTC based plugin-free video chat?

We're going to be covering a WebRTC codelab (written by Sam Dutton at Google) at the SF HTML5 WebRTC Hack Day (http://www.meetup.com/sfhtml5/events/139666482/) tomorrow:

https://bitbucket.org/webrtc/codelab

Another good set of WebRTC resources: https://github.com/muaz-khan/WebRTC-Experiment

For STUN/TURN, you'll probably want to take a look at this server: https://code.google.com/p/rfc5766-turn-server/

Re: Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

#9

Post by dinduks »

tomtheengineer wrote: post #6
dinduks wrote: post #5

I've been looking for software to video chat without being locked in an ecosystem (especially Google Hangouts), and WebRTC seems to do the trick just fine while being completely decentralized. I just tried vLine and the quality is pretty good compared to Skype for example. Thank you vLine. :) By the way, is HD video not supported or is the problem from my side?

HD is supported, but we haven't enabled it yet for vLine link. We're waiting until we can do a better job detecting whether both ends can handle the HD stream, since the current WebRTC code doesn't do a great job of CPU load feedback (e.g., sending a 720p HD stream to a low-powered machine). If you want to try out HD, register for a developer account at https://vline.com/developer/ and try the "Web Client". There is…

What might be a good idea is allowing HD and disabling it by default, letting people choose if they want it or not.

I tried GitTogether and HD worked like a charm. The only problem is that resolution doesn't scale to the Internet speed, which means HD all the time but at low frame rate. However, the service is awesome and has a bright future in my opinion. Good luck!

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