Show HN: Multiparty WebRTC video chat
opentokrtc.com
opentokrtc.com
Right now I think opentok is still one of the best webrtc offerings in the market but that is mainly because of the mobile support race which they seem to be losing ground on.
My one big request is to make the ios sdk less opaque. Just give us the source of the ios sdk. If it is going to be broken and have a bunch of issues that sucks but as long as I can start digging around into the sdk and fix my issues I care much less. As it stands right now it does not support iphone 4 and below and currently it is not showing the subscriber video on an iphone 5 even though the code works perfectly on ipads. Since the sdk is a blackbox and is the source of the silent errors all I can do is throw a bunch of weird hacky try/catch solutions around it.
TL;DR - Release the sourcecode for the ios sdk because it is buggy and the developers who use it need to route around the bugs.
Open sourcing the technology isn't really an option for us, and its not just because the technology we are working on is our IP. Laying the infrastructure and process conventions for accepting patches outside the company while driving a growing internal engineering team is non-trivial. Making a repo public isn't some magical pill that will help you get to your answer faster, there's a lot of planning and documentation needed to make open source work. If anything I'm confident that the number of inbound support queries would increase because of questions about the code itself. This would slow down the response time for developers that truly have an issue we should address quickly. An open source project could work under these conditions but for a team of our limited size it would only slow things down.
That being said we love the community of developers that contribute to open source and we have been trying to do more of it ourselves. Our framework integrations are OSS (PhoneGap plugin, Titanium module, more to come), and we're eternally grateful to participate in projects like Google's webrtc implementation.
TL;DR: Open sourcing the project would slow the development down. If you need support, we're all ears and want to make that experience the best it can be (and the forums are public so you can hold us accountable).
They're not lofty hyper-articulate hackers with fancy setups working remotely on a super cool island, they're in their poorly-lit rooms with messy hair getting work done. You all look strangely like me o_O
By using a service like OpenTok, you can augment your WebRTC experience because you well be able to stream to thousands of users, tunnel through blocked ports, and generally more firewall friendly.
Great question tho.
Even if you haven't, all p2p 1:1 traffic is free