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Comment by atum47 | Hacker News Reader

I was fiddling with webrtc last week and I end up creating a very simplistic video chat. I was amazed on how easy it is to implement that kind of stuff. server (signaling) and client didn't took more than a few hundred lines of JS code.

I was determined to make a real app out of it, but everything I could think of, there were already other people doing similar stuff.

But its a nice piece of tech WebRTC, really impressed me.

here's my video chat in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbQsQqbt70g (no audio cause I was using it to capture me speaking for the video recording)

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I strongly suggest, for your next step up as a JS person, to take a peek at mediasoup.org. P2P has obvious scalability limitations. That lib not only makes server side forwarding easy (once you read example code), but it abstracts a lot of real-world needed WebRTC features such as simulcast and bandwidth estimation. You'll be making high quality Zoom-like pages in no time (beware though, the dev community ain't great for that lib because at least one of the authors comes off quite rude in the forums).

Also I'd be remiss to not point out the OP's own pion Go libs which do similar on the server side.

I'll check it out. thanks for the suggestion.

Is the server-side implementation of Mediasoup fairly light? Would be cool to run SFU inside something like a Cloudflare worker.

Not that light. It's a set of workers built in c++ and works with libwebrtc over udp. Cloudflare workers is js/v8 only and is specific to HTTP.

I suspect we will see a deluge of video chat apps in the near future. They will be similar to the wave of chat apps that appeared around 2015. I hope that the technology will mature soon. The current state of video communication seems improvable.

well, I thought about doing a video chat over some game play, so two friends could play a match of anything while having a video conversation, next day some one posted something similar here on HN.

I then thought about drawing on top of the video stream so you can use as like one os those games where you have to guess what the other people is drawing or, to coach someone one to one and being able to "comment" on their screen as they speak, but again, I'm pretty sure every video chats does that. So I left the idea on the drawer for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS3_CRr7tys (draw on the stream)

Any chance you can link the first one (video chat over gameplay)? I'm working on something similar. I've tried searching and didn't turn up all that much.

no, because not the game nor the app is ready, haha. sorry to disappoint

I was thinking something about Yahoo used to do: a chat room with several types of games and you and your friend could play one of those games while trash talk to each other on video

Sorry, I meant the link you saw here about someone doing something similar. I tried to find it on HN Search but only found stuff about board games.

my bad. there you go

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24210590

Thank you!

Also Show HN: Chess and Video Chat, no login required

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22790728

https://rootshirechess.glitch.me/ (https://glitch.com/edit/#!/rootshirechess)

You're discounting the applications far too readily !!! I'm absolutely convinced there's lots of open space for video apps.

Heck, maybe the Zoom ubiquity might have removed barriers for entry !

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