
Pluot – big-screen video conferencing for startups - kwindla
https://pluot.co
======
kwindla
Hi. Co-founder of Pluot, here.

We built Pluot because we know first-hand how much big-screen video
conferencing improves the experience of working with remote colleagues. Daily
standups, project meetings, and lots of other stuff gets way better when you
can sit around a table, and everyone can see both camera feeds and screen
shares at the same time.

But all the video conferencing systems on the market are too expensive for
startups, or are somewhat involved set up and maintain, or didn’t have the
features we wanted. So we scratched our own itch and built a little appliance,
using WebRTC and atom-shell (which is now electron). Once we’d built it and
showed it to some friends, we decided enough other people might want it that
we kept working on it.

You can play with the software stack from any Chrome web browser. Go here to
bounce through to a unique meeting URL, then copy that URL and send it to
anyone you want to have a video call with:
[https://pluot.co/new](https://pluot.co/new)

So far, that’s more or less like Google Hangouts. But that same video call
stack runs, with a different UI, on our little Pluot device. So if you’ve got
a Pluot hooked up to the TV (or two TVs) in your conference room, you can join
the meeting that way.

The Pluot device is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu Core. We boot from the stock
Ubuntu kernel, then load a bundle of Javascript that looks for the network
(and walks you through configuring a wifi connection with a QR code, if
there’s no ethernet cable plugged in and no previous wifi configuration). Then
we pull down another bundle of Javascript that defines the basic behavior of
the system. Finally, when you start a video call you’re hitting the same web
stuff as in the [https://pluot.co/new](https://pluot.co/new) link, above. But
we know you’re running on our hardware, so we customize the UI for the TV
screen.

All the WebRTC media streams are peer-to-peer. That means generally you’re
going to get the best latency and encoding quality possible for whatever
internet connection you’re on. The downside is that we have to do a lot of
encoding/decoding -- we support four locations joining a call and two
simultaneous screen-shares from participants. That’s why we’re using an Intel
Core i3 instead of a cheaper ARM option.

Finally, it’s a lot of fun to design a unified UI that runs on big screens,
laptops/desktops, and phones, and that multiple people are going to be using
simultaneously for real-time interaction. You can participate in a Pluot call
on a big screen or a laptop/desktop. We don’t ship with a plastic remote
control, instead you use a web browser on a laptop or phone to control the big
screen experience. So, lots of different pixel contexts. At the moment, we’re
still working on layering in the final UI for the browser client. It’s
basically still wireframes!

Thanks for reading this far, if you got this far. We’d love to hear the HN
community’s feedback on what we’re doing. We love talking about this stuff.

