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Comment by hootener | Hacker News Reader

I think you've hit the nail on the head, here. WebRTC is really great for a handful of people. Implementation using some third party was never the difficult part, but scale was and is still a total nightmare.

I'd love to see WebRTC done by a service provider in a highly scalable way, so I can stop relying on RTMP (and typically embedding a flash player to support it) to deliver live streaming audio/video on a large scale.

As someone who has only leveraged WebRTC through third party providers (e.g., OpenTOK, etc.), I have no idea the complexity of what I'm asking for. Perhaps it's boil the ocean difficult, but it sure would be nice to have!

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Yeah, I don't think that it is boil the ocean difficult but there is definitely some complexity there. I have been working on a scala WebRTC server, but I am not sure if it would really work at a large scale

Here was my basic approach:

An end user creates a PeerConnection with a Publisher node and starts sending a MediaStream using a string identifier.

Then another user can create a PeerConnection with a Subscriber node using the same identifier.

The Subscriber node then makes a request to the Publisher to make another PeerConnection to a Registry that exists on the same node as the Subscriber.

The replicated MediaStream can then be attached to the Subscriber.

Since the replicated MediaStream is in a Registry, any additional subscribers can attach the MediaStream on the same node as well.

The code is a huge mess but it is here (The scala server is in the media directory): https://github.com/jgrowl/livehq

There is a vagrant file that brings up the whole system at the root of the project (using docker). I have not tested it recently on anything other than ubuntu.

I've been working on exactly this. It's not horribly difficult if you've got experience building media servers, but it is tedious, because WebRTC has so many more moving parts than eg, RTMP, and the tooling is not very mature yet. Not to mention WebRTC itself is still a bit in flux (eg, ORTC).

Unfortunately, until IE and Safari support WebRTC, then RTMP is really still the best way to do low-latency streaming and video chat in the browser. Additionally, most RTMP server software will scale out to hundreds of clients out of the box.

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