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Comment by obviyus | Hacker News Reader

Love to see more WebRTC! Shame to see FTL go, I contributed a few PRs to Lightspeed[1] which relied on FTL to achieve sub-second latencies.

On a slightly off-topic note, I’ve been working on a simple WebRTC radio project[2] for a social listening experience. In my limited testing with a few friends, I was able to get < 100ms of lag (audio de-sync) between different players on different networks. It has been an absolute joy to use. The social experience of listening to music together somehow really appeals to me.

It was pleasantly simple to get it up and running with socket.io + Mediasoup as the SFU. I plan to flesh it out a lot more shortly but I’m a bit of a novice. Would love to have some more experienced eyes on the project :D

[1]: https://github.com/GRVYDEV/Lightspeed-ingest

[2]: https://github.com/obviyus/radio

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Big fan of FTL also, it is a shame that it was orphaned. In a world where Mixer lives on I could see FTL being a lot more places. ftl-sdk was nice to work with since it was just a single C library, and only concerned itself with streaming client/server.

The way I see it WebRTC is the best way forward to enable people to build interesting things. I was so excited to itemize all the use cases that would be added to OBS by merging WebRTC support. I also wrote a little bit about 'Why WebRTC' https://pion.ly/blog/why-webrtc/. The big advantage WebRTC has over FTL is that is does more. Broadcast is a small part of WebRTC. I think WebRTC's superpower is that it can be used for so many different use cases and industries. Even if another protocol is better at a single use case, it is hard to beat the breadth of WebRTC.

WebRTC isn't without its issues. I think that is fixed by better education + more implementations and owners. We shall see what the future holds :)

A few years back I also used WebRTC with different backends (Kurento, Puppeteer, Mediasoup) to try and make an audio-based social network. I got pretty far but I was on my own and a grad student at the same time so the project died. A few years later Clubhouse became viral, it was essentially the same thing I was doing.

I still use WebRTC for my personal projects but the difficulty of compiling and embedding it in a backend makes it really hard to use by the masses. My next project is going to use Pion, and I'm going to make a static compilation and just distribute the executable and have the main service use IPC to communicate with the Pion module.

That sounds like a really interesting project!

If there is anything I can do to help please tell me, always happy to help :) Either email me sean @ pion.ly or join https://pion.ly/slack.

Slack is better, but some prefer email!

OBS is heavily architected around plugins, many of the built-in features including FTL output are plugins, so even if it is removed it would likely be possible to turn FTL support into a separate plugin that users can install. For reference the FTL code is in the plugin called obs-outputs (part of the main OBS repo). The only real limitation I know of is that it is likely not possible to make the UI exactly the same as it currently is.

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