One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone(blog.appear.in)

42 pointsby dagingaavor 12 Jahren16 comments

blog.appear.in

One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone

http://blog.appear.in/post/87769862260/one-click-video-conversations-without-registration-on

17 comments

joeyspnvor 12 Jahren

> "As far as we know, we are one of the first services built purely on WebRTC to launch a dedicated iOS app"

Hookflash [0] is a dedicated WebRTC iOS app that has been around since 2012 or so, and has a badass signaling layer with OpenPeer [1]... it also provides a SDK for building this kind of services in just a couple of hours.

But then you also have OpenTok [2], that has been offering a similar iOS SDK with native WebRTC stack since late 2012 / early 2013, Mashme.tv [3] also in 2013, EasyRTC in mid 2013 [4], and hundreds of similar apps and solutions that are popping up like mushrooms (AddLive, etc...) and also use WebRTC in iOS..

What I'm trying to say is that WebRTC on iOS is already a quite crowded space, and the first services were deployed years ago (late 2012)...

It would be more interesting to know what have you used in the signaling plane (websockets? pusher/pubnub? old sip?) how you have solved things like NAT traversal (TURN, ICE, Hole Punching, etc), or which solution you use for MCU...

[0] http://hookflash.com/

[1] http://openpeer.org/

[2] http://tokbox.com/opentok/

[3] http://www.mashme.tv/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY

bruunvor 12 Jahren

For those interested, this was realized using the open-source Objective-C library from the WebRTC project. https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%...

macNchzvor 12 Jahren

This is great! I've really enjoyed using the appear.in web client...I do like the zero configuration aspect, but more importantly it performs dramatically better than Skype or Google Hangouts, in terms of both CPU usage and video quality over a busy connection.

I've had many days where Hangouts was essentially unusable...stuttering, pixelated, and glitchy, but switching to an appear.in room worked nearly flawlessly, even with a group of several people. Looking forward to being able to use it on mobile!

rahimnathwanivor 12 Jahren

This is awesome. You should update the FAQ page:

"Currently iOS does not offer support in browsers for services like appear.in. We are working on exploring how we can make appear.in available for iOS. To be the first to be notified when it is available, you can sign up here (http://eepurl.com/N8Bez)."

bruunvor 12 Jahren

Well spotted, thanks :-)

rasz_plvor 12 Jahren

>not possible to get WebRTC-based services

you can use previously discussed on HN jsmpeg to do MPEG streaming and decoding in pure javascript

http://instant-webcam.com/

rahimnathwanivor 12 Jahren

If two iPhone users, each behind a different NAT router with upnp enabled, use this to converse, will the media stream go directly between them, or via an appear.in server?

[deleted]vor 12 Jahren

arb99vor 12 Jahren

the App store rules say:

"Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex "Chat Roulette")"

Once (if) this becomes popular it will have the chat roulette problem...

evvvor 12 Jahren

Actually, probably not. Snapchat used to have this "problem", and they were never kicked off the app store for it.

epsvor 12 Jahren

Looks very tempting, but how do you make money?

tbassettovor 12 Jahren

For now, I guess it's just surviving by being a subsidiary of the giant Telenor Group.

kirkusvor 12 Jahren

looks interesting...how are you storing user information?

plgvor 12 Jahren

how many people can join a video chat room at once?

return0vor 12 Jahren

Since it's webRTC, the traffic is point-to-point, right? I guess you would need a good connection for more than a few clients.

mvavor 12 Jahren

"Video conversations with up to 8 people for free."

Guess there will be a paid plan later which allows more people.

dangvor 12 Jahren

This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN.

Please don't ring-vote posts (i.e. solicit upvotes). Besides setting off the ring detector, doing so will eventually get your account penalized.