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Comment by olegk | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to send the video stream directly to the other user, not through the server? Sort of P2P-like?

Yes, and this is what chatroulette does.

I did a TCP dump of the traffic and the data sent to the central servers is very minimal, mostly short plain-text messages containing little bits of information - your partner's camera status, number of users online, next button pressed, etc.

Are you absolutely sure about that? I don't think Flash supports that natively, so it would involve some real weird hackery to do something like run an RTMP server on both of the client machines in a Java applet or something, plus NAT traversal hole punching and other disgusting hackery.

I'm only sure because I saw a bunch of RTMP and Flex messages going to the central servers (they all have similar IP addresses) and a lot of UDP traffic going to a pretty much random IP address that changed with every person I talked to.

Also, Fogbugz copilot does something similar. It's described at a high level here: https://www.copilot.com/tech/ which links to http://nutss.gforge.cis.cornell.edu/stunt.php

So here's how it works: Flash 10 has built in p2p support. Firewalls can block this, so if the firewall to the far peer is blocked,the near peer falls back to Stratus (adobe Server), which probably has a socket? open to the far peer.

> Flash 10 has built in p2p support.

Oh!

Don't worry, so does Chromium.

If thats the case, and its using stratus:

1: He is either misquoted or lieing about bandwidth usage in the article.

2: He is breaking adobe's tos for stratus, as you are not allowed to run ads along side any tech using it.

I did not know about stratus (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/), looks interesting! Now let's hope Red5 is planning to provide stratus/RTMFP support soon...

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/stratus.html

I don't see anything in the TOS against advertising.

Nor in the FAQ, with regards to commercial applications: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/

Edit: That's an article. We're talking about the actual TOS, which does not specifically disallow advertising: i think they simply want to make sure people aren't billing for access to p2p services (which is stated clearly in the TOS).

Look harder then:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/p2p_ap...

"Stratus is for non-commercial use only."

Additionally, when you receive your beta access they show additional docs letting you know that if you want to run ads/make money you need to look into livecycle. Even had a adobe rep contact us after we launched one of our p2p services informing us of such.

If you create a standalone client yes. Otherwise domain policies and firewalls will prevent this.

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