Orange Meets: a demo application built using Cloudflare Calls | Hacker News Reader

Orange Meets: a demo application built using Cloudflare Calls

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68 pointsulrischa18 comments

Cloudflare has been doing some amazing stuff with live video.

I am so glad they did WHIP/WHEP[0] support. That lets me push video from my browser and pull via GStreamer. Or I can push via OBS and watch in browser with 300ms of latency! When developers start to see what’s possible I expect to see another wave of WebRTC innovation :)

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/stream/webrtc-beta/

> Cloudflare has been doing some amazing stuff with live video.

webrtchacks posits Cloudflare uses pion for ICE, an amazing software you built! https://webrtchacks.com/how-cloudflare-glares-at-webrtc-with... / https://archive.is/irgee

> I am so glad they did WHIP/WHEP support.

Here's their recent blogpost: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-calls-anycast-webrtc / https://archive.is/qdyJS

300ms is the same interval originally used in iOS to distinguish between a tap event and a double-tap. IOW, while not "realtime", its's pretty damn fast. I wonder what the theoretical lower limit is for your use case?

I have just finished writing a multiparty videoconferencing web app using WebRTC today. It was not easy (all tutorials are outdated and using libraries that abstract away WebRTC), but it was fun. I will check this out.

Seems cool! Was getting into WebRTC last year and this would have helped a lot. Is the pricing for this available yet?

Looks to be $0.05 / realtime GB

https://blog.cloudflare.com/whats-next-for-cloudflare-media

What bandwidth does a typical video call use per hour?

First TB is free. I would assume at least 1.5 Mbps for HD so ~5.4 Gbph ... ~.7 GBph so 3.5¢ per hour if my math checks out.

Unclear if that would multiply by number of callers.

Depends what codec! For 1280x720 with a VMAF score of 90 this is the numbers I use.

* H264 - 1.25Mbps

* VP8 - 1.00Mbps

* VP9 - 700kbps

* AV1 - 550kbps

What did you find difficult about WebRTC? What could have been better/easier?

I couldn't tell if this was a joke.

Why do you think this was a joke?

I have have been trying my best to make WebRTC more accessible [0] [1]. It's powerful, but the complexity makes it challenging.

[0] https://github.com/pion

[1] https://webrtcforthecurious.com

Thanks for your work -- I've used pion before myself.

Then you know the answer to that question. I imagine on a thread like this that would only tread the surface of the complexity, the first question will always be "What the hell even is STUN, TURN, ICE, SCTP, DTLS, SRTP?"

And thats the beginning of the complexity. But it's also a naturally complex problem. So, I thought it was a joke.

To me it was that all tutorials are very outdated, using deprecated browser APIs, and/or using packages and services that abstract away WebRTC (SimpleWebRTC deprecated package and service, PeerJS, etc...), and none of them using TypeScript.

So I wrote my own WebRTC app that solves all of those issues [0].

I really liked your book, but there's no code in it at all, and I'm a person that learns more by following examples and applying them.

I honestly found it a bit weird that a book about WebRTC has no code at all.

[0]: https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc

Thanks for your contribution and maintaining the pion library(I am a user). The thing is that WebRTC usually isn't a complete solution, many don't want to have p2p but a p2s2p(which usually means distributed computing/SFU) solution, which makes developing an application way too complex.

SMS & Email Delivery

If Cloudflare got into the SMS & Email delivery, they’d give Twilio some good competition.

They've got email: https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/email-worker...

No they don't, to my surprise (I was just looking for this yesterday and was disappointed to have to try sendgrid since CF does not appear to offer any email sending API)

That's not generic email sending to any address, that's just sending email ops notifications to your verified, fixed admin email address. Receiving emails is also well supported. But you won't be emailing your users this way

Right now the functionality seems to try real hard to allow coming close to letting you send email to arbitrary addresses. I suspect actually dealing with spam management is a big enough hassle they don't want to get involved with it unless they're going to do it full heartedly.

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