
Hublin: open-source video conferencing - based2
https://hubl.in/
======
dguido
Hah, we wrote one of these too. It's fun! Our code for it is super clean and
documented if you want to learn how to use WebRTC:
[https://github.com/trailofbits/tubertc](https://github.com/trailofbits/tubertc)

The hardest part is getting the signaling to work correctly over the internet
(STUN/TURN/etc), which is why we advertise Tuber as only working on LANs. We
tried to get some non-profit funding to finish that part up to no avail. I
wonder how Hublin solved that problem?

I am really glad to see one of these finally go fully open-source. It has been
stupid to see conferencing app after conferencing app only available through a
hosted website. How are you supposed to deprecate expensive, proprietary
enterprise videochat platforms if you can't deploy behind a firewall!?

ps. our logo is better than yours heh:
[https://blog.trailofbits.com/2015/12/15/self-hosted-video-
ch...](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2015/12/15/self-hosted-video-chat-with-
tuber/)

~~~
Omnipresent
That is really cool. Thanks for sharing. For someone with no knowledge of
WebRTC, it would be helpful to have a blog post that explains the architecutre
of tubertc and how it functions.

------
nosuchthing
Video chat systems/protocols look to be somewhat stagnate/immature. I just
wanted to do 720p 30FPS screen sharing across the internet (Europe to
America), and this can be done with $10,000 dedicated hardware encoders and a
ridiculously expensive mile for mile dedicated layer 2 network route.

-OR-

Alternatively, we could purchase a ~$200 elgato HDMI capture box, and create a
free youtube account to stream 60FPS 1080p across the planet.

Currently there is no in between for high FPS video streaming systems on the
internet.

There's also [https://jitsi.org/](https://jitsi.org/) and
[https://obsproject.com/](https://obsproject.com/) , but they don't seem to
allow P2P connections with buffering options. The trade off for low/unreliable
bandwidth is allowing larger buffers which would impose greater latency.

~~~
TD-Linux
Your two examples are not equivalent at all. Video conferencing is generally
designed for very low delays, whereas Youtube live streaming has a many second
delay. This is critical to improving quality - not only can fancier video
compression schemes be used with a large delay (B frames etc), but larger
buffers mean that spikes in bitrate can be smoothed out. This is especially
noticeable for screensharing where screen data updates tend to come in huge
spikes with lulls of no changes in between.

~~~
nosuchthing

      Your two examples are not equivalent at all.
    

Well yes, that's what I stipulated by mentioning

    
    
      The trade off for low/unreliable bandwidth is allowing 
      larger buffers which would impose greater latency
    
    

Video conferencing systems mostly prioritize low latency, so as bandwidth
decreases (cross continent internet connections currently almost always have
latency/bandwidth issues) either frames will drop, or resolution will need to
drop. For our purposes of screen sharing/broadcasting we didn't care as much
about low latency as much as we wanted high FPS and high resolution.

------
justsaysmthng
Maybe it's just me, but I find it a bit ... odd? to have my video conferencing
tool running inside the browser.

I have Skype running as a separate application and I have it's icon in the
Dock and I can switch to it, it runs in the background, etc. I know that this
is the tool responsible for my communication. My contacts are also running it
and it usually starts automatically on their system so most probably they're
online.

A conference tool running inside the browser doesn't have these properties. I
look at it as a website which I can visit or not.

This, I guess is a problem with all WebRTC implementations out there - it
might be great in terms of capabilities, but it's not very practical in terms
of heavy daily usage.

~~~
dvirsky
Considering that Google Hangouts is perhaps the best video conferencing tool
I've tried, it's not odd for me at all.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sigh. We used to make a really good tool, but it was all proprietary. It
supported up to 20 participants with full-duplex audio and multiple doc
sharing. But it was part of a full product for collaborative teams, and we
couldn't figure out the sales process fast enough.

It scaled well - hundreds of different conference participants per server
node; media nodes that supported hundreds of simultaneous streams. Stream
switching was on the order of scores of milliseconds ( _not seconds like all
the webrtc stuff_ ).

~~~
dvirsky
did it work inside the browser? as a Linux user, that's a big plus, not having
to be stuck with some lame version like in Skype's case, or not have any
working version at all.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
No, that's the kiss of death for performant conferencing. At least at the
levels we were reaching for. And we only had a headless version of the media
engine on Linux, which was used for 'bot testing and for the media node (MCU
in webrtc parlance). In other words, the cloud version.

We had a port to Android for a little while. Then a Wine version. But the
native Linux one was an orphan.

------
briankwest
[https://www.freeswitch.org](https://www.freeswitch.org) does all this and
then some, But does so in a traditional MCU role, It can bring WebRTC and
transcode vp8,h264 and h263 and SIP Endpoints together in the same Video
Conference.

~~~
dublinben
It took me way too long to find what license this is published under. It
appears to be MPL 1.1, btw.

------
AdamGibbins
Only supports up to 8 participants, unfortuantely. Continually on the hunt for
something that takes >15 (like Hangout) and doesn't cost a bomb and is truely
cross platform (Linux, Windows, OS X, Android, iOS).

~~~
dublinben
Have you tried either the web-based or desktop version of Jitsi? There's no
hard cap on the number of participants.

~~~
wiz21c
I've tried Jitsi a lot but on Linux, it just doesn't work well, many little
bugs make it unreliable :-(

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sococo is constantly working to improve the experience (improve Jitsi). They
support large conferences! And they're free to start with anyway.

------
ianbicking
"Based on WebRTC which allows decentralized communication between browsers.
Your video conference is not streamed to Hubl.in in any way."

How is it doing this? Is each peer sending video to all the other peers?
(I.e., with 3 users, each user has two outgoing and two incoming streams?)

~~~
benevol
> How is it doing this?

Good question. Until now, with WebRTC, you always needed a STUN, TURN and
signaling server [0]. And I would be very surprised if they somehow managed to
create a whole new architecture. It certainly seems like these servers are run
centrally by Hublin.

[0]
[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/infrastructure...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/infrastructure/)

~~~
brazzledazzle
I think they're saying the content of the video stream isn't sent to them.

~~~
benevol
In a WebRTC architecture, the media (video call stream) gets sent over a TURN
server. I don't see where they say that you will set up your own TURN server.

~~~
brazzledazzle
My understanding is that STUN only coordinates connections between peers. A
TURN server is required if that fails. So presumably they don't have a TURN
server and only support clients that can peer with each other.

------
krig
There's also Jangouts:

[https://github.com/jangouts/jangouts](https://github.com/jangouts/jangouts)

~~~
yxlx
They should've named it Bangouts or Gangouts.

~~~
rectang
Jeah®!!

------
cheez
Does anyone know of a good screen-sharing service that doesn't require any
download or account creation?

Kind of like those remote help desk apps: I want to send a link and have them
sharing their screen with me, no fuss.

~~~
cpeterso
Firefox Hello supports web page sharing, but not full screen sharing. Only the
page sharer needs to be using Firefox.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/browse-web-pages-
togeth...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/browse-web-pages-together-
firefox-hello)

------
Freak_NL
It is nice to see all these WebRTC solutions appear. For teams wishing to do
teleconferencing using any platform (mobile and desktop) this is good news.

I wonder how long before a FOSS self-hosted solution is available?

What I couldn't figure out from [http://hubl.in](http://hubl.in) though; how
is Linagora going to cover the costs of (and presumably raise a profit from)
this service? Is it a freemium model, or is the current phase simply intended
to garner interest and gain a foothold in the market?

------
wyred
Am I the only one getting an invalid cert error?

NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

Subject: hubl.in

Issuer: Gandi Standard SSL CA 2

Expires on: 2017/03/06

Current date: 2016/03/16

~~~
k33l0r
Seems that the server is sending an incomplete chain:
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=hubl.in](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=hubl.in)
(“This server's certificate chain is incomplete”)

------
sleepless
Screensharing would be a great addition.

------
yeukhon
WebRTC is very promising. "Hello" in Firefox is surprising stable (although I
know a lot of people don't like Mozilla partnering with Telefonica) but there
are occasions my remote teammates would find using Hello give them better
screen resolution and latency. In one case, I was able to do real-time
troubleshoot with an end-user problem over "Hello." Typically we'd use Skype
or Webex.

Does anyone know whether WebRTC is used in HipChat and Slack video feature?

~~~
cpeterso
Slack does use WebRTC:

[https://bloggeek.me/slack-acquires-screenhero/](https://bloggeek.me/slack-
acquires-screenhero/)

[https://webrtchacks.com/dear-slack/](https://webrtchacks.com/dear-slack/)

------
itsnotvalid
What a shame that Apple haven't got WebRTC supported, and I think it would
still take a long way to go.

------
Trufa
Interesting, anyone want to give it a go? [https://hubl.in/carefully-
spectacular-rhone](https://hubl.in/carefully-spectacular-rhone)

Had a quick chat with another user, works fine for this limited tryout at
least.

I like that adoption is not such a problem as you only have to share a link.

------
shock
[https://hubl.in/loyally-fine-paris](https://hubl.in/loyally-fine-paris)

~~~
yxlx
Empty room.

------
Jemm
Doesn't run on Safari, the native Mac web browser.

~~~
vardyr
Safari doesn't support WebRTC yet. [https://github.com/sarandogou/webrtc-
everywhere/](https://github.com/sarandogou/webrtc-everywhere/) might help, but
I've never tried it so I can't vouch for it.

