Show HN: WebRTC Nuts and Bolts, A holistic way of understanding how WebRTC runs

Re:Show HN: WebRTC Nuts and Bolts, A holistic way of underst... by bryans on Sunday May 29, 2022 @11:00AM (#31549652)

It may not meet the qualifications of "production," but about a year ago I made an OBS.Ninja clone with some specifics for live streamers, and I was extremely satisfied with the reliability of WebRTC -- multiple hour streams with zero dropouts, and without any fancy code to handle reconnects or adjusting for lower bandwidth. It just kinda magically works. The browser implementations are an absolute disaster, but if you can make those limitations work for the project (or if you don't need to use a browser at all), then I'd feel pretty confident using it in production and at scale.

NewTek actually uses WebRTC for NDI's remote networking, and while the NDI software itself is prone to crashing and probably not usable for production, the connection to the remote system is never an issue.

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Re:Show HN: WebRTC Nuts and Bolts, A holistic way of underst... by hrnn on Sunday May 29, 2022 @12:03PM (#31550201)

Did you use homebrew stun/turn servers too?

I don't find the webrtc signaling and set up particularly noteworthy, but once you try to connect nodes on different networks you're pretty much dependant on some third party.

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Re:Show HN: WebRTC Nuts and Bolts, A holistic way of underst... by bryans on Sunday May 29, 2022 @12:58PM (#31550632)

Luckily there are a lot of cheap STUN/TURN services out there, and if you really need something under your control, there are containerized projects on GH that make it easy to run your own. Though even when I used it as a Zoom replacement for meetings, I never ran into a situation where TURN was necessary, and that includes people behind corporate firewalls. It seems as though corporate netops learned some lessons during the pandemic and loosened restrictions.

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