As I understand webrtc, it describes the connection wrapping and the streams / negotiation, but not the discovery part. Which means it's about as p2p as http - if you add a way to find the endpoint and open sockets, you can make peers talk.
Is there something more in the OBS implementation that makes it more p2p? Am I missing something?
it's not really meant to be a useful tool for making a pure peer-to-peer video service.
I have a chapter on signaling here https://webrtcforthecurious.com/docs/02-signaling/
I have an example of WebRTC without signaling https://github.com/pion/offline-browser-communication. Each side has to agree on things ahead of time. Useful for security cameras/IoT/LAN stuff though!
`localhost` is allowed. Could you reverse port forward the service to localhost? That will get around those restrictions.
Meanwhile I can hack together a poor man's webrtc by sending raw packets over websockets and playback works just fine. I just lose all the real benefits of webrtc (robustness, udp vs tcp, etc.). It feels like it should be possible to work around "secure context" nonsense since I don't access anything on the clients, they just play back a stream from the devices. But chrome/ff tends to block the ice handshake in http mode.
But yeah, one way or another, you need a secure context for WebRTC to work. That’s in the spec, and browsers follow it.
Perhaps in your context it really is nonsense, but how is the browser to know that your network/physical layer is secure?
That discovery mechanism can be a decentralized network where any contact is an entrypoint. You connect to the network ~once and from that point onward everything is p2p and no fixed servers are involved or in control.
Usually you'd divide what you're talking about into two different steps. Peer discovery, and peer transport.
Discovery is how you find other peers, sometimes its via DHT, sometimes it's hard-coded, other times just random walk. But just like in WebRTC, (and in TCP), you need to get the address from somewhere out of band, so you can connect, usually something like a centralized directory. But the transport of data, is P2P, just like TCP. So once you've found the peer and connected to it, all data goes directly between you.
Doesn't make it less/more P2P than any other P2P system out there.