Icecomm – Add Serverless Video Chat and Data Transfer to Your Site | Hacker News Reader

Icecomm – Add Serverless Video Chat and Data Transfer to Your Site

icecomm.io

179 pointstrizko61 comments

This looks interesting but when I scrolled down I saw the message "Built for Chrome" and I'm left with the impression that this software is for Chrome only. Is that correct? I use Firefox so won't be able to use it.

If the notice is just about the website, I'm left wondering why they would include an advertisement for a browser from an advertising company on the site?

Users that are okay with ads and vendor lock-in already have plenty of bigger and more established options, so I'm still trying to figure out how this service might appeal to me - maybe not at all?

My guess is that their product is supplying the fallback TURN/STUN for WebRTC connections, and some multi-person call algorithms.

WebRTC is by no means Chrome only (see: http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2014/10/16/test-the-n...).

They may currently only have tested on chrome browsers (maybe someone tried it once in FF and something broke so they didn't bother).

built for chrome, still building for firefox.. lol

The 2 browsers still have not agreed completely on implementations for WebRTC, but we are definitely working on it.

Thank you

Okay, well good luck with the project then. I think I'll stick with Firefox Hello for now, but I'd love to be able to implement a 'video click to call' button on a website using WebRTC. Much like Skype but using no plugins and with the option to self-host it.

Why isn't there a Google Hangout clone with WebRTC already? It seems so easy to setup (similar to url shortener or pastebins), but there is no standard site everybody uses (like tinyurl.com before everybody made his own).

edit: Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate your work. My point is that there is no standard yet. Is it just too early or does Hangout/Skype have some inherent advantage?

There is https://tokbox.com/opentok/

It's probably the backend used by the forthcoming Mozilla Hello, as the two companies have ties (in Firefox OS).

Looks like it (about:config?filter=loop.CSP)

default-src 'self' about: file: chrome:;

img-src 'self' data: http://www.gravatar.com/ about: file: chrome:;

font-src 'none';

connect-src wss://.tokbox.com https://*.opentok.com https://*.tokbox.com wss://.mozilla.com https://*.mozilla.org wss://*.mozaws.net;

media-src blob:

https://appear.in/

I've been using appear.in for months. That said, WebRTC makes it so easy that videochat/screensharing is basically a commodity now. Someone will have to innovate on top of it to make something better by enough to become standard, and that hasn't happened yet.

You should give http://crowdcast.io a try. It innovates on top of Hangouts.

You should say something about why I would want to try it if you're going to market your product here. I'm not going to request an invite to something I know nothing about other than that it solves a problem I already have a tool for.

Firefox's Hello is an amazing early free alternative.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/hello/

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/01/13/firefox-hello-makes...

A "Google Hangout clone" would, in fact, essentially be a contact management app which dings you when someone wants to talk to you - at the moment, you can use practically any site, they all give you links to share with your friends.

The issue is, of course, getting people to add all their friends into yet another app. You might be able to grab them from Facebook, but then you'll lose all your users as soon as Facebook implements video chat, and you still have to convince everyone to have your app open.

Check out https://github.com/strukturag/spreed-webrtc for an open source WebRTC server.

Try https://room.co

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers

There is https://talky.io/

That was part of why we built this. Give me a message at icecomm.io@gmail.com - I'd love to help you build one!

Thought of doing a TogetherJS-like feature, too? I'm already using TogetherJS, and icecomm.io and TogetherJS seem to play pretty nice together .. but it'd be nice to have it all in one package, obviously ..

Looks pretty good .. but I had some hiccups that I haven't quite debugged yet. It appears that the <video> object needs to be instantiated somewhere earlier than the (in my case bowser'ified) icecomm script .. and it was kind of hit and miss between me on Chrome/OSX, my buddy on Chrome/OSX and my other buddy on Chrome/Linux whether we could get the Linux-guy into our session .. I'll chalk it up to a loose and fast hack at trying to make this work on our site, but .. generally .. its freaking awesome! Felt like the intro to the Brady Bunch when we got some connections, lol ..

EDIT: doesn't work with Safari on OSX, it seems .. dunno why, maybe autoplay=true is not valid? I'm not a web guy, though, so could also just be PEBCAK.

I get a bunch of 520 errors for the js resources and a 500 for the d3.js (charting). In addition:

    Uncaught Error: [$injector:modulerr] http://errors.angularjs.org/1.2.18/$injector/modulerr?p0=tawnyOwlApp&p1=Err…gleapis.com%2Fajax%2Flibs%2Fangularjs%2F1.2.18%2Fangular.min.js%3A18%3A139)

Same for me. Getting 500 errors everywhere. I'll just check back at a later date when the resource is back up!

Thanks for your patience. It should be working fine now!

Whoa, instant awkwardness going on in the jsfiddle page from people who changed the 'audio' parameter to true

This is a silly question. How is this not a "thing" already? What am I missing? None the less, great work!

I keep trying to sign up but the verification link doesn't seem to do anything? Just plops me back to the homepage, subsequent logins fail, and subsequent registration attempts with the same info succeed (to the point of sending me the confirmation email)... am I doing something dumb?

I found the verification link doesn't say anything, but after login I was presented with the API key and then I was able to get things working...

Hey, thanks for the heads up- we are taking a look at this right now, seems like it was a scaling issue.

How many connections can you have until one has to pay? what does signing up offer?

Since the app is so new there is currently no paid component to it. Signing up allows you to get an API key which you need to include in your Icecomm code.

I believe google hangouts has just started offering webrtc https://gigaom.com/2014/07/06/so-long-plug-ins-google-hangou...

It's plugin-free if you use their own browser (chrome/chromium). So I have to assume there's something non-standard going on or else Firefox wouldn't need a plugin.

UPDATE: Signup/Login problems have been fixed!

Please let us know if you are having more troubles.

Thank you

What's the advantage of this over PeerJS? What is your guys' pricing going to look like? Can I deploy this to something with thousands of users already?

Looks like you can create a chatroulette clone with just a few lines of JS, not bad as a demo of what you can do with it.

What's wrong with just using WebRTC with an open source layer on top?

Tried this on an iPhone and getting a blank black box.

Hey, it's Nick, another one of the creators. Icecomm provides the STUN/TURN servers and backend signaling servers for convenience/ease of use for the frontend.

Can you elaborate on whats needed on the backend to make this happen? I'm new to WebRTC, and am very excited about the possibility of adding realtime video chat to my site - but I really don't want another third-party involved (no offense). I'd be quite happy to purchase a server license, as long as I could run that server wherever I wanted and not depend on hosting it elsewhere ..

We actually have a page dedicated to the behind-the-scenes stuff that should answer your question: http://icecomm.io/how-it-works

Cool - thanks for that! I'll dig into it.

WebRTC is only extensively implemented on Desktop Chrome, Desktop Firefox, and Android Chrome.

Opera and the newly released Vivaldi also works, but they are based on chromium/blink engines so.

JSFiddle confirmed my preconceptions of the demographics of Hacker News

Go on...

The jsfiddle demo doesn't seem to be working (OS X / Safari)

After a few tests it seems to work with Windows/Linux while running chrome only. I had issues with FF/Opera/Saf/IE.

Same here (CentOS / Chrome)

Has anyone been able to login yet? what is the benefit of signing up?

We're having some scaling problems that will be resolved very soon. The benefit of signing up is getting the API key so that you can start using Icecomm.

Thank you everyone!

is this a service to help easier establish a peer-to-peer connection? If so, how much will it cost? and what are the long term plans?

Hey Will here (one of the creators). Yep we wanted to make setting up WebRTC - allowing P2P connections client-to-client, without a server as simple as possible. The pricing plan is not fully worked out- we're thinking something similar to Kimono labs with free up to a certain number of connections and then potentially a paid tier to cover costs

But it's early days - thoughts on the kimono labs route?

The HTTPS version shows just a withe page. I had to disable my SSL enforcer for the domain to see anything.

Does this work with Android?

Chrome for Android should work, but we've only tested on 1 Android device so far.

Sure does work with the latest Chrome on Android

This is sick!

jsfiddle is the new chatroulette!

it's not 8 lines.. you need to manually add 8 lines but you also link another source file that is pretty large: http://cdn.icecomm.io/icecomm.js

You can say the same thing in any language.

"it's not 8 lines.. you need to manually add 8 lines but you also import java.util.ArrayList that is pretty large"

or to stick with dynamic flavors..

"it's not 8 lines.. you need to manually add 8 lines but you also include this module: <link to large module>"

so there is one line NoSQL server? `git clone git@github.com:mongodb/mongo.git` the point is that you have to choose your wording and make sure you say that it's not "only" 8 lines of code, it's only 8 lines of settings...

It's 8 lines to add Icecomm to your site—hundreds of lines to create Icecomm.

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