Show HN: pion/ion, self-hosted conferencing software with single command deploy | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: pion/ion, self-hosted conferencing software with single command deploy

github.com

124 pointsSean-Der23 comments

Really excited to share pion/ion! It is a distributed RTC System written in Pure Go and Flutter. It can be used for video conferencing, live streaming and most other media streaming problems. It has a lot of interesting features, but the ones that seem to excite people the most are.

* Distributed by default - Designed to allow running different workloads and scaling them out as you need

* Flutter and JS SDK - Ready to be used on Web, Android and iOS!

* Designed to be modified - Modify the UI/Backend so you can have custom experiences for your use cases. As long as you satisfy public APIs any piece can be swapped.

* Easy to deploy - docker-compose with LetsEncrypt support. Spin up a conference server with on command

* Performant - You can run multi person conference calls on AWS free tier instances

* A joy to develop - Pure Go means quick builds, and a code base that anyone can contribute too!

* Community owned - The only thing driving the project is the contributors and users

We also plan on adding lots more, with some of the following in our road-map already. [0] If you are interested in learning more about some of this stuff, this is a great chance! It is really rewarding seeing all the innovative things being built.

* RTMP Ingestion

* SIP Support

* Server Side Processing/OpenCV

* Record calls

We would also love to have you! If you are interested in working on this project you should join our Slack[1]

[0] https://github.com/pion/ion/projects/1

[1] https://pion.ly/slack

This sounds interesting, but I can't tell what it is -- there's too much terminology I'm not familiar with. The list of features is all tech-centric and doesn't step back and say what the thing does.

I think it is a self-hosted video conferencing solution, which sounds awesome, but I'm not certain of that. I assume "RTC System" is not a real-time clock. I've heard of Go, and Flutter sounds like some sort of Web UI system.

Can anyone explain this a little more simply, please?

Guessing it refers to WebRTC, like "real time communications". Can't help more than that though. That README is not so readable.

You are exactly right, it is a self-hosted video conferencing system. It was designed in a way that lets you do some extra stuff that could be nice (like pull in an external video feed)

I will work on making the README more friendly! If anyone else is interested I would love help, working in this space has made me biased so I tend to write thing for myself.

Thanks, Sean-Der.

And, that's a good point. The curse of knowledge is real :-)

I've been keeping an eye on the pion/ion ecosystem, since I like the idea of an independent WebRTC stack that doesn't essentially bundle Chrome's implementation, and I've toyed with the idea of self-hosting a conferencing system.

It looks like a lot of progress has been made since the last time I visited the repo.

Congrats.

I suppose it's time for me to learn Go.

Thanks :)

I think it is super important to have multiple implementations of important protocols (like WebRTC, DTLS and SCTP). It brings more resiliency, and it helps people learn them. It seems like in tech a lot of things get re-invented just because we don't do a good job of teaching the next generation...

We would love to have you join the community [0]! If you have any questions/thoughts while learning Go and Pion I will be there to answer them.

[0] https://pion.ly/slack

Sadly pion is not built with meson, a missed opportunity for a particle physics pun.

Got excited, followed the readme and installed onto VPS. Users can join, but nothing ever happens beyond the 'waiting for people to join message'.

It seems to bind to a large number of ports (including a port 80 redirector, which isn't really helpful on a host that's likely to be serving other stuff), and I can only assume there's some hidden firewall dependency that I've missed.

Such as shame, as it shows great promise.

Turned firewall off, still no dice. Bummer.

This looks excellent, nice work and thanks for releasing it at a time when this kind of thing is even more critical to free us from the shackles of commercial/closed source products.

I had a quick look only so apologies if I missed it, but are there any build/deploy instructions that do not require Docker?

Thanks!

What's the audio latency like? I've been looking for something that can be made resppnsive enough to allow musicians to collaborate online.

As I understand it, musicians need latency under 10 ms, which is going to be tough to get under real world conditions. I'm seeing 12ms round trip to a DNS server, so you're going to need to be practically in the same building to pull off a jam session.

https://www.churchproduction.com/education/latency-and-its-a...

Well, as someone on that pages comments points out, a distance of just a few meters would give you over 10ms of latency, so I reckon there is some more leeway.

It's definitely a tricky problem though, which is why I figured a more customizable solution would be better.

Check out https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

You might want to look into ninjam.

Impressive. With mobile SDKs as well.

Thanks! cloudwebrtc[0] is on the cutting edge with making Flutter+WebRTC work. I don't know it as much as I should, but really seems like the future.

[0] https://github.com/cloudwebrtc/flutter-webrtc

Are there any plans to support react native?

looks interesting, is this similar to jitsi project as far as functions go?

What's a good way to estimate server requirements?

Sorry I don't have any exact numbers. For fun I threw it on a micro instance and didn't have a problem with 7 people in the call.

I am going to work on writing an Apache Bench for WebRTC this year though. It is really hard to load test/bench this stuff because the tooling just doesn't exist. A lot of people roll out WebRTC, but then go down under real world load.

for webrtc the load is on the clients. the server load is for "poor connectivity" clients. the ones tha need nat transversal and proxing of kinds.

in summary, if you have first class clients you can "host" a million person session in a raspberypi. if you have two bad clients, you better have tons of cpu and bandwidth!

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