Does WebRTC strike anyone as too many things in one package?
It's P2P, video, audio, codecs, and a whole slew of other things all bundled up together into the same "standard."
The P2P part is really really useful, but I could see some vendors wanting to break that off for various reasons. You can do that of course but... well... it's sort of like if "WiFi" referred to 802.11 + a bunch of video codecs + a routing standard + transport protocols + ...
> Does WebRTC strike anyone as too many things in one package?
It does too many things. I want to use WebRTC data channels for a multiplayer game, but the current implementation libraries tie-in all the media components. It would be nice if there was a WebRTC implementation that provided data channels without having the media functionality.
While we don't provide a build target for compiling the data channel without the audio and video parts, it's not that hard to remove from the build. It's just some build file hacking (basically remove webrtcvideoengine.cc and webrtcvoiceengine.cc).
Would you mind filing an issue at https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/issues/list to ask us to make a nicer build target? It won't be top priority, but we get around to it. Or better yet, if you get it working, send a patch. We'd probably include such a build target.
You can't have video chat with audio, video, codecs, p2p, the whole thing. The only piece you can remove from the whole and still have video chat work is the data channel.
If all you want is the data channel, then you can ignore the audio/video part, and just use the data channel separately. It doesn't do you any harm.
It's P2P, video, audio, codecs, and a whole slew of other things all bundled up together into the same "standard."
The P2P part is really really useful, but I could see some vendors wanting to break that off for various reasons. You can do that of course but... well... it's sort of like if "WiFi" referred to 802.11 + a bunch of video codecs + a routing standard + transport protocols + ...