Show HN: Browse HN Together in Three.js | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Browse HN Together in Three.js

threejs-example.hyperbeam.com

268 pointsdeclan_g132 comments

Hey HN,

We’re Philip, Amby, and Declan, and we made “multiplayer virtual computers” that you can embed anywhere, including 3D spaces. We decided to build this because we noticed that embedding third-party apps and websites can be a nightmare due to incompatible platforms, security issues, and poor UX. Adding multiplayer functionality to these embeds makes this problem exponentially more difficult.

On the backend, we’re spinning up a VM and running a resource-optimized fork of Chromium which we then stream to participants via WebRTC. Since we’re hosting the servers running the applications, multiple users can connect and control the virtual computer seamlessly, and their client just needs to handle a video stream.

If you want to add multiplayer virtual computers to your own app, you can sign up on https://hyperbeam.com/?ch=hn&cm=hn1, grab a free API key, and throw the provided embed URL in an iframe in your app.

You can also play around more with the Three.js demo in our interactive sandbox: https://app.sideguide.dev/hyperbeam/threejs/

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment or shoot me an email at declan@hyperbeam.com.

Thanks!

Docs: https://docs.hyperbeam.com Discord: https://discord.gg/D78RsGfQjq

Open articleView on HN

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't understand the multiplayer aspect -- I'm in the interactive Chrome browser I can play with, but there's nobody else here. I'm not browsing together with anybody.

If it matters, the HN link redirects for me to:

https://threejs-example.hyperbeam.com/672b6071

and the ID at the end stays the same even in incognito.

Since this is on the front page and I've been waiting around for 5 minutes there must be other people using it. How is it supposed to be multiplayer?

EDIT: once I posted this comment somebody else joined, I see how it works now. Very cool. I guess it depends on winding up with a shared ID or something?

Right now when you click the link we create a new "room" based on your IP. If you share the generated URL (like you did above) then people can join in and cobrowse with you

Maybe create a default room for the HN crowd to join? I also had the same experience as OP... "nobody is here".

Seems like the link with the specific ID in my above comment has become the de-facto shared room now, at least as long as my comment stays at the top :)

It's not very umm... cooperative, in there lol.

Yea sorry it's our bad, we didn't implement cursor time-slicing in the demo, even though we actually support it on the API: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hyperbeam/web#setting-permiss...

Hmm, what I was thinking of was that everyone seemed to be competing with each other to click random UI elements on the virtual browser as rapidly as possible, I assume because there wasn't a way to speak with one another / coordinate. Or maybe I just missed the chat area?

Yeah we kept the MVP lean and didn't add chat or audio/video calling. Our goal (which we're not meeting) is to keep the Three.js example line count below 200.

https://github.com/hyperbeam/threejs-example

We'll probably make a new project which is more of a product and less of a code example in the future.

Looks good so far, looking forward to seeing more :)

The first thing another user did was go to 4chan. I think the concept is really cool but maybe it needs a little more thought.

Yeah we didn't anticipate somebody sharing their room in the comments — we're trying our best to moderate that room.

Fingers crossed the board they went on was the papercraft & origami board.

Interesting research question: how to build features to make sharing control less chaotic and potentially moderate abuse.

But the core experience is great. Works flawlessly even on an iPhone. Congrats!

People seem to be trying really hard to get porn in the browser. There's a battle going on...

Gahh thanks for the heads up

And its down haha

It's so funny looking at this room and seeing people tryna exploit it. And talk to each other via the search bar.

Someone is already doing nmap online on the host

It seems a bit of a community has formed here, with a couple of places for chat without the need of backoff algorithms:

https://pad.riseup.net/p/1_prWgNWMqs-Hu_bIi3I

https://app.kosmi.io/room/m4gsd4

“users, uh, find a way”

There's a couple ways of opening multiple windows, which enables title bar controls on every window. Minimizing and closing them softlocks to a black screen until the instance resets.

Two weeks on, the thread is closing. Still some traces of activity in the VM. In the interest of site history, https://archive.is/https://pad.riseup.net/p/1_prWgNWMqs-Hu_b...

Oops, left off the asterisk from the end of the URL. The snapshots of individual versions are under the 'url prefix' listing.

So, the reply period is per-item! Enabling advanced necromancy...

What sorcery is this? Youtube videos are opening without any delay (within half a second) and there's no frame lag even with 1080 quality setting. How does this work?

I'm surprised Widevine DRM allows this but I guess you can't really detect "I'm in a VM and being streamed visually by the host".

You can't even take a screenshot of YouTube TV if you don't run it in a VM. Goes to the clipboard as all black.

How does HyperBeam not get abused (and consequentially shut down) for people wanting to share a stream of a pay-per-view / YouTube TV style subscription with their friends?

Widevine isn't used on regular videos.

After you visit the link, copy-paste it into a new window. The content will be synchronized ;)

If I leave the video playing and close the tab, it keeps on playing the audio.

Yep. We're running Chromium in the cloud and streaming it back as a video. When you visit https://threejs-example.hyperbeam.com, it will create a "room" and append the room ID to the URL (e.g. https://threejs-example.hyperbeam.com/abc).

All viewers in the same room see and hear the same video stream, and can control the same browser instance.

Hey. I'm not the person you're responding to, but your response sparked my interest given the context.

It sounds like you're saying, "Yes. Our technology enables someone to listen to YouTube without forcing them to continually view the video."

If so, I would like to caution you to tread lightly in this area. I'd built a 300K MAU YouTube-streaming Chrome extension which was ultimately terminated due to advertisers complaining to YouTube that viewers might consume content without visually seeing an advertisement. I went through a year of attempting to mitigate their concerns, but, ultimately, their expectation was that all a/v content become paused the moment video is not visible.

The only exception to this rule, that I am aware of, is Twitch.TV streamers listening to YouTube while streaming and viewers of the stream consuming that YouTube content without seeing the visuals. This is a backroom agreement between Amazon and the RIAA and is not an agreement I would encourage others to hope to achieve.

Obviously, you're not bound by YouTube's TOS, but run afoul and you'll find hyperbeam added to the big 4's url blacklist. This will prevent all YouTube content from playing through your domain.

How would they block this exactly?

Technically? YouTube users are free to describe a deny list of domains. If the referer request header mentions the domain then content does not play.

If you employ technical mitigations, such as issuing requests from a server and misleading with the referer, YouTube will reach out with a C&D. If you don't honor it, then prepare to defend your usage in court similar to ytdl. They will make the case that 1984 Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. doesn't apply to here as there's clear commercial intent supporting the desire to re-stream media content

I was mostly curious about this statement:

> Obviously, you're not bound by YouTube's TOS, but run afoul and you'll find hyperbeam added to the big 4's url blacklist. This will prevent all YouTube content from playing through your domain.

This seems like a non-issue since by the very nature of the service no referer is sent. The browser is spun up in a VM and streamed to the client through WebRTC.

So in order to technically block this they would need to know all the possible IPs of the servers.

Yeah. Running as a Chrome extension I had the ability to rewrite my referer to any URL I chose and had the technically sound defense of "My referer shouldn't be <domain> because I am an extension not a website"

When I commented on the technical viability of enforcement, they simply had a lawyer tell me to stop instead. If I had had enough spare resources to challenge it, then maybe things would've ended differently.

Just wanting to make sure we don't get caught up on focusing on what is technically possible. That's not how the world works. Laws, and interpretations of those laws, define what is allowed to be done with code.

It does open without delay, but for me, the sound and video are quite laggy.

I shared my link with my wife but she saw something entirely different... wasn't she supposed to be the same thing as me with the same "room" link?

You just have a really good internet connection. Lags a lot on my mobile internet.

I can browse the Web like I'm in a data center. Speedtest.net shows 776 Mb downloads, 928 Mb uploads. That's way better than the Internet access where I live.

Isn't it awesome? That's also a major use case of the Mighty browser/service https://www.mightyapp.com/

I write a open source desktop environment, supported by spice-html5, and I'm impressed (its survived the NH "hug of death") - this is true sourcey.

Amazing job OP :)

Thanks! I'm intrigued by what you built (long-time Linux user here), can you share a link?

Whatever I've built is not ready for NH.

Bask in your glory, truly amazing job :)

This is the most random funnest thing i've done in days. I tried to inception it by pasting the hyperbeam link into the VC, didn't work though heh.

https://xkcd.com/244/

I was also disappointed it didn't work.

You can actually get it to work if you run it locally. The problem is that the demo requires WebGL, and the servers we're handing out don't support WebGL.

See the "webgl" parameter here: https://docs.hyperbeam.com/start-chromium-session#parameters

A little easter egg for the devs that try our API :)

Rabb.it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabb.it) did this some years ago. It was an amazing service, but it unfortunately shut down. This is very close to what it was back then.

We actually started out as a clone of Rabb.it in December 2019, we went by the name "Tutturu.tv": https://www.reddit.com/r/uwaterloo/comments/efkznp/fydp_tutt...

The watch party website is still up at https://watch.hyperbeam.com, we're the biggest Rabb.it alt that offers virtual browsers.

Without Rabb.it, we wouldn't be here haha

Looking over the API docs now

https://docs.hyperbeam.com/start-chromium-session

First thing that comes to my mind is... this is kind of like Puppeteer. Even if that is what they are using in the background... would they ever expose it so existing Puppeteer apps could plug and play (like https://www.browserless.io/)?

We're not using puppeteer in the background, but people have asked for puppeteer support. Do you use browserless.io? We think they do a great job and don't see a point competing with them.

Would appreciate your thoughts.

Selenium & Appium creator here. I'm kinda jumping up and down at how awesome this demo is. While browser automation with puppeteer would be cool... I see in your docs that you also support running a remote Android emulator. As someone who spends a lot of time in the test automation space, there is a ton of potential here for mobile test automation (spinning up all kinds of different configs). So here's a vote for using the W3C WebDriver spec [1] if you support an automation API -- then you'll get desktop browser /and/ mobile device automation in the same API.. and it's the W3C standard. :-)

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver2/

Hey hugs, just want to say Selenium is awesome. Super cool having the creator of the testing framework we used during university commenting on our post.

Would love to learn more about the mobile test automation space, I'll send off an email.

Please do! Also, fwiw... I'm also a huge fan of Three.js... On my todo list is to embed a live video feed of a mobile device's screen into the simulator [1] for my phone-testing robots. I imagine we'd have a ton to talk about!

[1]: https://construct.tapster.io/t3plus

Sent an email :) We can help with an MVP

Three.js does this out of the box. https://adndevblog.typepad.com/cloud_and_mobile/2015/07/embe... What am I missing?

That approach relies on an iframe to load 3rd party sites. Sadly, this won't work for a lot of websites like news.ycombinator.com.

Furthermore, an iframe cannot be synchronized across participants. If you and I load YouTube in an iframe, it's not guaranteed that our videos are sync'd.

With Hyperbeam, you can embed any website and the content is sync'd. Think of it like sitting beside somebody with a computer.

Launch HN: Hyperbeam API (YC W22) – Multiplayer embeds of any website - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30433104 - Feb 2022 (63 comments)

This is simply amazing. I wish it was open source, but totally understand why that is not realistic or possible.

It's crazy to think this is built off forked chromium yet there is no really good self-hosted cross-platform Remote Desktop app.

Keep up the good work!

We might open-source something in the future. Honestly we haven't open-sourced Hyperbeam because the code is a bit messy. In the mean time you can check out https://github.com/crybapp, we're partnered with them.

Hyperbeam started out as anime watch party website for our engineering capstone project in 2019, so the commit history is a bit comical. https://uwaterloo.ca/news/engineering-students/taking-innova...

Several people are curious about the magic behind Hyperbeam. If you ever want to chat here's all our emails + Discord tags:

founders@hyperbeam.com

philip@hyperbeam.com (CEO) - Philip#9001

amby@hyperbeam.com (CTO) - Ambyjkl#4365

declan@hyperbeam.com (CPO) - Dek#7777

wow, this is really cool. star it on gh right away.

I manage to vist https://glicol.org and get some live coding music there

but the audio seems to be compressed a lot and the cpu seems to be overloaded

I cannot open console there so I cannot tell

with that being said, I think it is really promising and look forward to the update

Thanks for pointing that out, we'll dig deeper.

Also thanks for showing me glicol, I love dabbling with audio visualizers and often play around with the web audio API. Really cool that somebody made a DSL, I starred the project :)

Spoke to Amby, he said it might be because we throw away frequencies above 10 kHz. We'll try to fix the bug today, thanks again for catching this.

Wow, super cool stuff. Would love to know more about the server-side architecture and how you handle security in your VMs. Also, loved the interactive sandbox demo.

Thanks! Is there anything specific you want to learn more about? At a high level we run a fork of Chromium in the cloud, capture the desktop using gstreamer and stream it back to everyone using Mediasoup.

The folks at SideGuide made the interactive demo for us — we love it too.

Very cool! Is gstreamer used end to end? Mostly curious if you are using CEF (via cefsrc) and webrtcbin, or if you handled the input and output differently.

Thanks! Actually it's neither: we run full Chromium rather than CEF and Mediasoup for webrtc. We have looked into webrtcbin as well, but it wasn't the best fit for us.

Interesting! I've been using webrtcbin for some production work but it's been broadcasting of low latent internally used video with no user input back. I've seen demos of user input with webrtcbin, but have never done it in practice. If you can, do you mind sharing why webrtcbin wasn't a good fit for you (or why MediaSoup was better)?

webrtcbin is nice for one-to-one, but we were looking for something that's a better fit for one-to-many, which is where mediasoup came in. That being said, mediasoup is quite complex from a maintainability perspective since it's designed to handle several use cases, so we plan on making our own webrtc streaming solution in the future that's designed with only one-to-many in mind

Hi HN! I'm the CTO of Hyperbeam, happy to answer all the technical questions :)

You mentioned on your website that you have an android emulator, but I couldn't find more details. Do you have a demo URL for the android emulator? I'd love to check it out!

We're still building it out. In the meantime, there are alternatives like https://anbox-cloud.io/ which you can try.

Is there any use-case you have in mind? We're struggling to find people that want android emulators.

We at appmaker.xyz helps Shopify merchants to create native mobile apps without coding. An online emulator will help us to show a preview/demo in the browser. Currently, we're using appetize.

Too many agents (i.e. humans, bots) are trying to load NSFW gifs and even if you want to prevent them from doing so, the shortcuts are on their side to revisit past links. Good luck with content moderation. Even if you implemented a way to vote bad actors out (e.g. you can kick players from game lobbies that don't follow the rules via having a server-wide vote), I believe it would be out-botted.

Wow. That remote view runs surprisingly smooth on my cheap phone. Nice work.

This is very impressive technology, but I'm not sure what I'd use it for, to be honest. Does this technology have support for VR? Because I could see how this could be the future of doing computationally intensive tasks on under powered devices.

Thanks! We began building the tech for a watch party site (watch.hyperbeam.com) and were similarly skeptical of other viable applications. However, it turns out there are a ton of really cool use cases—here are some companies using our API right now:

Remote tutoring: https://www.teachwithkoala.com

VR offices & conferences: https://framevr.io

Watch parties: https://kosmi.io

Online coding lessons: https://www.strivemath.com

VS Code embeds: https://github.com/mintlify/connector

As for improving VR support, we're in the process of building a Unity SDK. Running computationally-expensive tasks in VR sounds really interesting in addition to the social use-case!

There's source code on GitHub for a simple version of this tech (without multiplayer or smooth and fast streaming): https://GitHub.com/crisdosyago/BrowserBox

And a closed source version that has multiplayer, audio and much faster streaming (than the GitHub version) that uses webrtc.

I also have a few projects to bring even higher quality streaming, including an xvfb headful version using an extension to enable getDisplayMedia APIs to share the screen.

It's a different approach to Hyperbeam. I love that there are more and more new and young products in this space!

Thanks for sharing, are you viewfinderjs from this thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30433104#30436865

Super curious how you got that many stars on your repository, that's impressive!

Thank you. Yeah my strategy has been:

Build. Post. Repeat.

This is remarkable stuff.

Suggestion: A hotkey (in or out of the virtual computer) that allows you to reset to the default orientation without having to reload the page. On a laptop with only a touchpad, I'm fighting with the controls a bit.

Do you have a specific hotkey in mind? Curious if there's a hotkey we could choose which is intuitive, so we don't need to add more text in the 3D space.

Tried Youtube and was surprisingly good.

Impressed by Hyperbeam tech behind. Bookmarked for later.

Thanks, we've been working hard on it!

Thanks. We started out as a watch party website (https://tutturu.tv) to watch anime with friends, so it should handle video very well.

The watch party website is still up here: https://watch.hyperbeam.com

I have no idea how to use (iPhone, iOS 15.6.1). There is a pink background and a black box saying outside virtual PC, and a few keyboard/mouse shortcuts (which doesn't apply as I'm on mobile)?

Same here on linux.

I'm guessing that other visitors get some content instead of the black box...

If you're on linux, you most likely need the H.264 ffmpeg codec package and things like the Cisco OpenH264 plugin for Firefox. Also, try unblocking WebRTC if you block it

Thanks. I just checked and all of these are installed / enabled.

Still, only a black rectangle is shown (also disabled ad blocker).

There are a couple of _warning_ messages in the dev console though, which might explain the origin of the issue:

> An AudioContext was prevented from starting automatically. It must be created or resumed after a user gesture on the page.

> Autoplay is only allowed when approved by the user, the site is activated by the user, or media is muted.

Hi HN! Happy to answer any questions you have about the demo and the tech.

1. This is genuinely impressive. It's a solid example of the reason I visit HN. Kudos to your team. 2. I'm genuinely curious how you anticipate folks using this. The watch-party use case is interesting but it's a crowded space and people are not likely lining up to pay. It seems like hilarious overkill for content embedding. I'm wondering what the killer app is? In the most optimistic way possible.

It's almost like it's so far ahead, I worry that people won't know what to do with it. It's like the "what would you do with infinite bandwidth" problem... even smart people tap out creatively depressingly quickly.

Thanks! > I'm wondering what the killer app is? In the most optimistic way possible We're in the process of figuring it out, but we believe the interactive aspect is super powerful.

Our landing page (https://hyperbeam.com) showcases some of our happy customers.

This is cool. Commenting to come back to

Very cool - any interesting use cases you have seen from users so far?

Yeah! Tbh we've actually been surprised by many. Here are some companies using our API:

Remote tutoring: https://www.teachwithkoala.com

VR offices & conferences: https://framevr.io

Watch parties: https://kosmi.io

Online coding lessons: https://www.strivemath.com

VS Code embeds: https://github.com/mintlify/connector

This is awesome!

Is there a way to get this to work on mobile? Tried on safari and chrome

Thanks! Yes, it works on mobile too.

When using the API you can set a specific height and width to resize the virtual computer. Additionally, we track touch events and you can drag-and-drop on devices like iPads.

Happy to chat more about it if you'd like! Feel free to join our Discord: https://discord.gg/D78RsGfQjq

It just shows a black screen where the browser should be on my phone but looks great in the browser.

If I wanted to run code that would say scroll through a site for everyone to watch, what is the best way to do it? From your docs looks like I should make a chrome extension and then have it install that?

Which version of iOS are you on?

Latest. 15.6.1

Thanks, I'll go look at what's happening

FYI I’m experiencing the same identical issue with the latest version of iPadOS.

How do you handle user credentials or general inputs? If I type in my Netflix credentials, don't you and/or my watch party friends get access to them in some way?

Great question.

We’re building a “privacy mode” feature to address this exact problem that allows the host to black out the screen when entering sensitive information like credentials.

As for Hyperbeam getting access to credentials—we don’t store any input from users in the virtual computer. The only things we track are the time a particular IP is connected to the VM and the domains that are visited (this is anonymized).

Beginning of the HN Metaverse

If HN had a metaverse, what would people want it to be like?

This sounds/looks very interesting, but I am not sure what the use-case is, from what I can tell the quality is pretty low in the demo (and can't full-screen), isn't something like TeamViewer a lot more performant (being p2p)?

Hi, thanks for the comment. Just to clarify—this is a demo of the virtual computer tech in 200 lines of code. It's not actually meant to be a functional product in and of itself.

With that said, the virtual computer technology has some big differences when compared to something like TeamViewer.

- First off, Hyperbeam allows many participants to connect to the same virtual computer at once. All audio/video is synchronized, and any participant can control it (although our API has granular control permissions).

- Hyperbeam requires no downloads

- We manage the infrastructure ourselves, meaning you can embed Hyperbeam virtual computers in your app and scale seamlessly

- You can embed Hyperbeam virtual computers in 3D software and VR

- You can programmatically control the web browser

Here are some companies that are currently using our tech:

Remote tutoring: https://www.teachwithkoala.com

VR offices & conferences: https://framevr.io

Watch parties: https://kosmi.io

Online coding lessons: https://www.strivemath.com

Thanks for the explanation!

Ok, I see, so the focus is more on the technology than the end-product.

How does it handle concurrency in interactions? https://liveblocks.io/blog/how-to-build-undo-redo-in-a-multi...

For anyone looking for the Github repo (it's open source): https://github.com/hyperbeam/threejs-example

Wild! Browsing the code, I love that it's basically one main.js file.

Thanks, we vehemently oppose bloat in our JS files ;)

This is pretty damn cool...

It's cool and all, but is there an actual use case for the multiplayer aspect?

Feels slightly like the infamous "hacking" scene when two people are using the same keyboard.

After trying to understand for 10 minutes what's supposed to happen, I tried it with Chrome. Doesn't this work with Safari on a Mac?

The underlying work you guys have done is great as a proof of concept, and after playing with it for a short while there are some obvious flaws and improvements which basically just come down to user experience.

As it stands, everyone's inputs clash.

The main issue is there's a single mouse pointer and keyboard input that all users control. It's quite chaotic as people scroll, click, select, etc. Provide some mechanism to nominate control authority or vote on interaction and it might be usable.

Thanks for the feedback. We already have this feature, it's just not implemented in this demo currently, but we'll be sure to add it. More info here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@hyperbeam/web#setting-permiss...

Might want to make your "Sign in with GitHub" not be "allow phillipscott" username/account or whatever.

Thank you so much for pointing that out, I'll fix that ASAP.

Also, this is a bit of a tangent but my first name has one "L". My mother named me after the Philippines and I'm of Scottish descent on my father's side.

https://docs.hyperbeam.com/start-chromium-session

I can't type/paste anything into the API key "Bearer" box above "Send Request" either.

The "Body" tab seems clickable but also doesn't work.

Thanks for pointing that out, we just shipped the docs "playground" system and it appears there's a few bugs — you'll need to use something like cURL in the meantime.

Here's a snippet you can start with:

curl -X POST -H 'Authorization: Bearer <your-api-key>' https://engine.hyperbeam.com/v0/vm

does not work. firefox dev

Thanks for letting us know, what version of Firefox are you on? Here's the Github repo by the way: https://github.com/hyperbeam/threejs-example

It does not work in Firefox on Linux.

First of all some spyware stuff from cloudflare gets blocked by the ad-blocker.

But this is not the root of the problem as it doesn't work either without the ad-blocker active.

Minified JS Script dies with some cryptic backtrace.

I've tried on the hyperbeam.com website and it does not work either.

It lies straight in my face about a missing H.264 codec. (Which works fine according to https://test-videos.co.uk/bigbuckbunny/mp4-h264).

It seems you never tested your stuff. The console is full of errors:

  Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v652eace1692a40cfa3763df669d7439c1639079717194. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). Status code: (null).

  None of the “sha512” hashes in the integrity attribute match the content of the subresource. -oXZ36ekQX2btnYIZSdj2g
  WEBGL_debug_renderer_info is deprecated in Firefox and will be removed. Please use RENDERER. chunk-vendors.9d9d262d.js:6:31482
  Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v652eace1692a40cfa3763df669d7439c1639079717194. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed). Status code: (null).

  None of the “sha512” hashes in the integrity attribute match the content of the subresource. -oXZ36ekQX2btnYIZSdj2g
  Some cookies are misusing the recommended “SameSite“ attribute 4
  Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://416c35e0.hyperbeam.com/ok?vm=0. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 200.

  Object { type: "New", payload: {…} }
  app.fc7f578d.js:1:42733
  Object { type: "Create", payload: {…} }
  app.fc7f578d.js:1:42733
  WebRTC: Using more than two STUN/TURN servers slows down discovery 2 vendorlate.27cb1e73.js:14
  WebRTC: Using five or more STUN/TURN servers causes problems 2 vendorlate.27cb1e73.js:14
  Object { type: "Consume", payload: {…} }
  app.fc7f578d.js:1:42733
  Consume error:  cannot consume1

The "cannot consume1" is the error that shows also on the three.js demo.

You most likely need this plugin: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/open-h264-plugin-firefo...

Seems like in Firefox, H.264 in WebRTC is supported in an entirely different fashion than other kinds of H.264, like in an MP4 file.

Besides that WebRTC is a tire fire¹ on any browser, why don't you just use VP8?

Should be available everywhere.

Enabling anything with "Cisco" in its name is out of scope for many (and anyway not available on Google's mobile OS).

___

¹ All implementations have severe quirks and some (like Safari) outright showstopper bugs. BTDT

The problem with VP8 is it's almost never hardware accelerated, neither on the encoding nor on the decoding side, so it's undesirable. Also, the software encoder x264 is quite far ahead of libvpx vp8 in terms of the encoding cost vs bitrate vs quality tradeoffs in our testing. We really hope AV1 solves all these issues once and for all in the years to come.

I guess you will need to make some compromises to make this work reliably.

My personal experience with WebRTC was: "One can be glad if one gets anything working at all across different environments". 0 stars, would not touch again (or only with a very very long pole; everybody has his price… ;-)).

The other thing that came to my mind is: Why do all that on the server? Seems costly.

One could build a "browser in browser", and share that (partly) P2P through the WebRTC screen-sharing feature. The "browser in browser" would be needed to be able to make that thing interactive as the screen-sharing feature transmits only a video. You would need to capture mouse and keyboard on the webpage within the "virtual browser" (and transmit it though an additional WebRTC stream). Capturing the inputs outside of the browser is not possible afik with WebRTC.

Also which OS? I have a hunch your version of Firefox doesn't have the H.264 codec which we need

Didn’t seem to like loading itself :)

This is slick, nice job!

Thanks!

this is really cool

Thanks! We think so too :)

Cool stuff guys!!!

wow good stuff

Thanks :)

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