

Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat - bstrong
http://blog.vline.com/post/63563738439/introducing-vline-link-free-simple-webrtc-video-chat

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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?

~~~
tomtheengineer
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](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vline))

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oninojak
Seems nice but turns out to be the worst kind of service: instead of offering
the marketed video chat, clicking 'go'displays a big advertisement for google
chrome. I really hate those 'free' product that try to push chrome on you.

So I tried again in firefox (because I value privacy too much to ever install
google products), and now I have a box with "connecting to room..."
accompanied by a sad attempt to give away my data to google analytics and
that's it.

So much for "copy. paste. video chat.", more like "relinquish your privacy to
google, do that again, copy, paste, hope this will work".

I'm sure I'm happy web browsers are getting the ability to control webcams and
watch as your surf the web.

~~~
tomtheengineer
Sorry you had a bad experience. It does work in Firefox, although there are
bugs in the current stable version (which is why we are encouraging Chrome).
Specifically, two nasty ones are audio echo
([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=916331](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=916331))
and audio latency (up to 10 seconds:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=785584](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=785584)).

What version of Firefox are you using? What OS?

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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?

~~~
tomtheengineer
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/](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](https://gittogether.com).

~~~
dinduks
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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evolve2k
Couldn't see from the article, does it support more than 2 computers on the
video chat, aka Hangouts style?

~~~
tomtheengineer
Yes, it supports multiple people -- we probably should have mentioned that.

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

~~~
tomtheengineer
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/](http://www.meetup.com/sfhtml5/events/139666482/))
tomorrow:

[https://bitbucket.org/webrtc/codelab](https://bitbucket.org/webrtc/codelab)

Another good set of WebRTC resources: [https://github.com/muaz-khan/WebRTC-
Experiment](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/](https://code.google.com/p/rfc5766-turn-server/)

