Do you have any examples of a webrtc video conferencing platform that provides a sufficient user experience over full mesh with 4 or more participants on disparate internet connections?

Im just saying that this library (and similar platforms) ARE the cutting edge of webrtc. At small number of participants, they use full mesh (which is e2ee), but at larger scale, they need to use an SFU (which is not e2ee without jumping through some crazy hoops - but this is being worked on)

No (but i hope they exist, havent looked) - however not all webrtc apps are general videoconf platforms. You don't even need servers if you go full p2p.

mediasoup co-author here.

> You don't even need servers if you go full p2p

If you have N participants into the same "room", and do not have a central SFU that relays streams to others, then you have a full mesh network with all participants sending audio and video to all the others. Is that the "go full p2p" you meant?. Well, try it, and you'll see how your CPU burns when the browser/app tries to encode your webcam video source N times. And of course, you'd need N x uplink.

You still need servers to handle the signalling, perform ICE and TURN where applicable.

Only if you need to support users without full internet connectivity. Again webrtc can be used in many different requirement contexts.

You can certainly manually handle the signalling to set up the offer/answer. e.g. read them out to your peer(s).

You would still need some form of STUN server (but there are a number of 'freely accessible' ones, even configured as defaults in some browsers) to get your reachable address/port/proto. You cant, AFAIK, handle this manually - it is handled internally as part of ICE. Then you would need to manually handle the signalling of these as well.

Thats the bare minimum you have to do to peer over webrtc under ideal circumstances, but its certainly doable.

So you do that for each peer. If you (or a peer) change streams you will do the same thing all over again

STUN is not needed if the participants have full internet connectivity, only if you have to work around NAT.

As mentioned, you cant manually set up your listening ports - this is handled internally by ICE, which needs to connect to a STUN server to get (at a minimum) your public IP address.

edit: cant reply to your comment fulafel, but on that project you posted: https://github.com/cjb/serverless-webrtc/blob/master/serverl... Also, note that even if this wasnt defined, some browsers contain defaults. You 100% need STUN, but you can handle the signalling manually - as I stated.

edit2: cant reply to your comment ibc, but I was explaining the bare minimum 'serverless' webrtc case still required a STUN server. I appreciate that mediasoup SFU uses ice-lite instead.

I know I've seen at least data channel working without STUN, this was the demo I think: https://github.com/cjb/serverless-webrtc/

If you say it's different with media channels, I'll believe you.

WebRTC can tell you your ip address without any external server, that only breaks if you are dealing with NAT.

edit: to clarify the NAT-less use case, i'm thinking of apps that can rely on/require p2p supporting IPv6 connectivity.

And somehow this discussion become a general topic about WebRTC scenarios. They do exist, yes, but mediasoup is a SFU scenario. No STUN is required at all. TURN may be needed if the client network/router blocks UDP.

Re your edit, ok i stand corrected, thanks for the correction!

mediasoup co-author here.

So you don't know what mediasoup does but you assure that "no need to use a SFU". Too much free time to comment maybe?

e2ee makes sense in one-to-one and N-to-N scenarios. It's just more complex in N-to-N scenarios because you DO need a centralized server so each participant just sends its audio/video once (to the server) and the server distributes it to others given whichever application policy/logic. That's a SFU, and that's what mediasoup does.

We may be talking past each other, I'm talking about webrtc in general as the subthread was discussinh that. Think about a limited user count screen sharing or vr app with a/v comms built in for example.

I thought this news was about mediasoup, not about WebRTC in general. Said that I agree that your scenario is valid without any media server.