Hacker News Reader

Comment by klabb3 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that webrtc is very complex, bloated and hard to debug. It’s the only way to do browser based p2p though.

Plug: I’m working on a much simpler server-assisted p2p lib with relay fallback, over tcp, with BYO identity/auth. This is certainly for different use cases, but I thought I’d mention it. If anyone is interested, I’d be curious about your use cases.

View on HN

Which parts are complex? I got a webrtc video chat app up and running from nothing in a weekend.

It gets difficult when you have users saying they can't connect to each other. Then you have to get a better grasp on networking to understand why they can't, sometimes staring at Chrome's webrtc-internals page hoping something clicks. Otherwise you'll have your hands tied and just assume their network is incompatible. Even with a TURN server configured, the same problem can occur.

I can install Ubuntu in a VM in a hour or so. That doesn't mean Ubuntu or virtual machines are simple pieces of software.

Try to find the RFC, then realize there are actually a million defining all the different protocols used by WebRTC. It is not simple :-).

me crying reading through STUN protocol RFCs. You're exactly correct though, once you want to scale it or make it a "quality" piece of software the amount of knowledge you need to ingest is massive.

The protocol and spec mostly, but also the establishment dance and too many knobs. Which client and server libs are you using? Chances are if you dig in their deps it’s messy.

It’s also designed for real-time video and audio (udp), so reliable high-bandwidth streaming p2p apps takes a back seat.

That doesn’t mean it’s not the right choice to build stuff with today, especially browser based real-time apps! I’m all for webrtc getting easier.

I didn't use anything other than the basic webrtc examples from github and a rather basic exchange using a web socket (server was express). Obviously not completely P2P because you need to exchange capabilities somehow. Tbh it probably took me longer to get the domain and coturn set up than the webrtc.

I didn't look into how much bandwidth was being used. I was mainly using it for 1-4 person calls during lockdown. I wanted to write a video calling app that I could have full control of.

It's always easy to run a variant of the main example of a library. The question is: how difficult does it get when you want to do something slightly different?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com