
Impressive: Video and voice calls in your browser without a plugin in sight - johntdyer
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/03/01/impressive-video-and-voice-calls-in-your-browser-without-a-plugin-in-sight/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=Impressive%3A%20Video%20and%20voice%20calls%20in%20your%20browser%20without%20a%20plugin%20in%20sight&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia
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mistercow
Neat, but is it really that impressive? Instead of using an external plugin,
the plugin is rolled into the browser. There was no reason to expect that
would be difficult. The real difficulty will be getting different browsers to
provide reasonably compatible implementations.

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akalsey
WebRTC is a w3c standard - it's part of HTML 5 - so getting browsers to
support it isn't going to be as big of a problem as you suspect.

Browsers today (even with HTML5) are mainly consumers of media. There's great
ways to get audio and video to a browser, but no capabilities for getting
access to a user's microphone and camera and no way of sending media from a
browser to elsewhere. WebRTC fixes that.

A phone call has two halves, there's the signaling (where does this call go
to, is it still active, did the other party hang up, etc) and the audio (the
"media" in telecom parlance). What Phono is doing in this demo is connecting
the media and the signaling from an early WebRTC implementation to the public
phone network. Using the audio capture from the browser and letting you make
and receive real phone calls with it.

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sologoub
Nicely put.

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thedangler
For basic video calling you don't need phono, WebRTC can do that all on its
own.

The other stuff is impressive.

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saghul
Well, then you need to implement your own discovery and routing mechanism. It
might just be a web page a la ChatRoulette, but _something_ is needed.

Phono uses XMPP for this (IIRC), which opens the window for really cool
integration with existing endpoints.

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rwaldron
Related: <http://weblog.bocoup.com/javascript-webrtc-opera-mobile-12/>

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johntdyer
More info on the Phono WebRTC plugin can be found here
<http://phono.com/webrtc>

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darklajid
An article that talks about two companies that I like a lot so far. On the
other hand - couldn't vox.io plug WebRTC in whenever it is supported and
therefor make the flash requirement optional in the future?

Interesting - I hope it'll land in a FF beta for me.

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fourstar
Only a matter of time.

<http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/getusermedia/intro>

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quattrofan
And Microsoft paid all that money for Skype....

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georgemcbay
I believe Microsoft (and eBay for that matter) vastly overpaid for Skype, but
at the same time Skype does way more more than this does. Comparing the two
things at all is disingenuous.

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quattrofan
Not really, I've used Skype since it launched and I love it. But like Word my
guess is that most people probably only use 20% of its functionality,
voice/video calling and chat. If this does that easily and for free, it will
very quickly eat into Skypes market. I for one would switch.

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georgemcbay
Google Voice w/Gmail integration and Google+ Hangouts have been doing all this
stuff for free for a while now and I'm a huge fan of both but I don't think
either has substantially changed Skype's market.

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anju
nice...!!!

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johntdyer
:)

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fourmii
Very nice effort. Hopefully this will help start a shake up of the entrenched
videoconferencing industry and all their expensive and cumbersome
technology...

