
Show HN: Multiparty WebRTC video chat - songzme
https://opentokrtc.com/
======
songzme
Link to source code:
[https://github.com/songz/OpenTokRTC](https://github.com/songz/OpenTokRTC)

~~~
xauronx
Connected for a second... but I'm in a room full of people quietly working.
Looks very cool though. I've been using OpenTok for a while, and it's looking
cooler/faster/cleaner every time I see it.

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fersho311
This demo Uses opentok for video streaming and fire base for presence, state
changes, and chat.

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pfisch
We use opentok a lot and are developing a system for it. My biggest issue with
it is reliability and incorrect behavior on the opaque opentok side of the
libraries. iOS support on the iphones seems unreliable right now and has a
bunch of unspecified silent errors when you init a subscriber from a new
stream. Even with the javascript libraries we sometimes find ourselves in
situations where the best solution is to programmatically refresh the page
because the opentok errors become unrecoverable. The javascript side is better
though. However, if tokbox.com is blocked by the firewall right now it does
not seem to attempt to route around it.

Right now I think opentok is still one of the best webrtc offerings in the
market but that is mainly because of the mobile support race which they seem
to be losing ground on.

My one big request is to make the ios sdk less opaque. Just give us the source
of the ios sdk. If it is going to be broken and have a bunch of issues that
sucks but as long as I can start digging around into the sdk and fix my issues
I care much less. As it stands right now it does not support iphone 4 and
below and currently it is not showing the subscriber video on an iphone 5 even
though the code works perfectly on ipads. Since the sdk is a blackbox and is
the source of the silent errors all I can do is throw a bunch of weird hacky
try/catch solutions around it.

TL;DR - Release the sourcecode for the ios sdk because it is buggy and the
developers who use it need to route around the bugs.

~~~
aoberoi
Dev Evangelist from TokBox here. I'm sorry you had difficulties working with
OpenTok. Our technology is bleeding edge and is moving terrifically fast so a
few bugs are a tradeoff thats worth the ability to be able to innovate in the
market. What this means for us as a business is that we've doubled down on our
support talent and infrastructure, all of which maintain quite a high level of
responsiveness to issues that come in (our premium support customers seem just
as happy to have us as we are to have them). I'm curious if you've used any of
those channels and if your issues went unanswered - if there's a leak in those
pipes that would be very important to us to fix. Lets address those silent
errors when initializing subscribers, please email support@tokbox.com.

Open sourcing the technology isn't really an option for us, and its not just
because the technology we are working on is our IP. Laying the infrastructure
and process conventions for accepting patches outside the company while
driving a growing internal engineering team is non-trivial. Making a repo
public isn't some magical pill that will help you get to your answer faster,
there's a lot of planning and documentation needed to make open source work.
If anything I'm confident that the number of inbound support queries would
increase because of questions about the code itself. This would slow down the
response time for developers that truly have an issue we should address
quickly. An open source project could work under these conditions but for a
team of our limited size it would only slow things down.

That being said we love the community of developers that contribute to open
source and we have been trying to do more of it ourselves. Our framework
integrations are OSS (PhoneGap plugin, Titanium module, more to come), and
we're eternally grateful to participate in projects like Google's webrtc
implementation.

TL;DR: Open sourcing the project would slow the development down. If you need
support, we're all ears and want to make that experience the best it can be
(and the forums are public so you can hold us accountable).

------
calinet6
Room: hackernews

~~~
christiangenco
Oh wow, this is so interesting. I've had this nebulous mental image of what
the average HNer looks like when reading comment responses, but now I can
actually _see_ them, and none of them look remotely like what I was picturing.

They're not lofty hyper-articulate hackers with fancy setups working remotely
on a super cool island, they're in their poorly-lit rooms with messy hair
getting work done. You all look strangely like me o_O

~~~
hamburglar
You obviously weren't in there when I was, broadcasting from my skull-shaped
office whose walls are shark tanks.

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klaussilveira
I had the chance to meet the OpenTok guys at TNW Latam this year and they are
amazing developers. The service is great and cheap... i'm dying to try
something with it as soon as i have some time on my hands.

~~~
songzme
Haha I remember you Klaus! You were demoing your startup that focuses on
teaching others how to code and I learned so much from you. Rock on!

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nicklovescode
Looks awesome! I need exactly this, but it needs to work for Safari/Chrome for
the latest iPad. Any ideas?

~~~
songzme
Chrome on iOS devices does not support webrtc (unfortunately). One solution is
to use OpenTok's iOS SDK and build an iOS app to make it work on native apps

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makmanalp
Nice job, guys! This could seriously put skype and webex (ughhh) out of
business.

~~~
est
meanwhile google hangouts still requires a plugin. Even in Chrome.

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singular
Seems to be down :( getting a heroku Application Error

~~~
songzme
HN sends a very powerful flow of traffic. Sorry about that, should be fixed.

~~~
singular
Yeah, working now thanks!

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tootie
Similar to [http://appear.in](http://appear.in), but no screensharing. Being
open source is a big plus.

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brickcap
How did you implement the filters though?

~~~
songzme
css 3 filters, Here's a quickie: [http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-
techniques/say-he...](http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-
techniques/say-hello-to-css3-filters/)

~~~
brickcap
Thanks for that link

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ilaksh
Isn't the point of WebRTC to avoid dependence upon a company like OpenTok?

~~~
songzme
The point of WebRTC is to allow real time communication in the browser. You
can do this via p2p data streaming without any services but you are limited to
p2p and its shortcomings (like maximum of 2 users, blocked ports, firewall,
etc).

By using a service like OpenTok, you can augment your WebRTC experience
because you well be able to stream to thousands of users, tunnel through
blocked ports, and generally more firewall friendly.

Great question tho.

~~~
ilaksh
I didn't know that webrtc was limited to two users. If it is how does opentok
get around that? My understanding of webrtc was that it uses UDP so it can get
around firewalls and such by using STUN or things like that. So my experiments
with webrgc used an open source library that was using some Google sever and
the author of the library's server for making connections and also firebase. I
think k the guys name was muaz Kahn or something. Anyway I think all you
really need servers for is the initial connection establishment. And there are
free servers up providing that. So if webrtc truly has a limitation on 2 peers
then I doubt opentok actually has any magic patch for webrtc.. maybe they have
a script that creates a bunch of Iframes or something.

~~~
songzme
To use webrtc with more than 2 users you would need a webrtc streaming server
that receives an incoming webrtc packet and sends it to all listening
connections. Like a pub-sub model

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lelandbatey
Well this is fun : ). I'm "dudeInBlue" in the chat.

~~~
changdizzle
dudeinblue, you should have talked more! we were haroldandkumar here at the
tokbox office

~~~
pmx
I (dudeinwhite) attempted to talk but I kept bugging out :(

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matthewcford
Shame the are revising their pricing to remove free 1:1 chats.

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changdizzle
1:1 chats that go through our servers will be charged, if you've built before
Aug 31st all 1:1 is free!

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matthewcford
True, however if you want to use the WebRTC API it'll be charged, even 1:1.

~~~
sillysaurus2
The reason this matters is because free 1:1 gives you a growth vector. Without
it, you won't grow nearly as large. And growth is the all-important metric,
not revenue.

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PleaseBeSerious
Any ability to record?

~~~
changdizzle
No recording yet, but we're looking to have an archiving beta by the end of
the year

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brianbreslin
LiveNinja.com is using this for webcasts.

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fersho311
Ive used liveNinja and its awesome!

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automobill
nice project

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brickcap
Very cool.

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douglasisshiny
works well on my nexus4.

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bedspax
cool.

