On the July 10, 2024 episode of WebRTC Live, Arin welcomed back Chad Hart. Chad is a well-known WebRTC industry analyst, editor of webrtcHacks.com, Director of Engineering at RingCentral, and past co-organizer of the KrankyGeek events.
Bonus Content
- Info on the upcoming ClueCon and RTC.on conferences.
- Our regular monthly industry chat with Tsahi Levent-Levi.
Key Insights and Episode Highlights below.
Watch Episode 92!
Key Insights
⚡ GitHub is a valuable source for WebRTC trends. As Chad nicely points out, GitHub is a great place to discover the latest WebRTC trends but also follow community projects and track user activity. He explains, “There’s a lot of great data that you can get just off of GitHub and what’s going on. WebRTC, I think it’s unique in that, I mean, I think it’s pretty safe to say the majority of activity for WebRTC, there’s something that goes on inside GitHub. So, it’s a really great data repository. So we can look at that to understand trends, both in terms of new users, if WebRTC is popular, look at terms within it.”
⚡ WebRTC’s growth remains steady. Despite concerns about its lifespan, WebRTC’s growth is steady and stable. Chad says, “Everything has a beginning, has an end eventually. You do expect it can’t go forever. There are other technologies; it will get phased out. It’s inevitable, right? But the data is not showing that that’s happening at all. And I’ll jump around a little bit more, but I’m seeing a lot of new projects and activity and new projects, which is good. It’s not just maintenance on existing projects. So, again, that’s a positive sign that there’s still a lot of health and activity in WebRTC.”
⚡ Media over QUIC is more low-level compared to WebRTC. Both Media over QUIC and WebRTC serve critical roles in modern communication, but WebRTC is much easier to use for standard communication needs like video calls. Chad says, “I think some of the idea, too, is media over QUIC is much lower level, right? So WebRTC is relatively, I mean, I guess it’s one of the harder, I’d say, web APIs. But compared to Media over QUIC, WebRTC is probably going to be easy for doing a lot of things that you want to do. Well, it depends on the use case, but for trying to replicate what we’re doing here today, it’s going to be a ton of work to try to do something like that in Media over QUIC. Maybe not worth it at the end of the day.”
Episode Highlights
How to use GitHub to analyze WebRTC trends and development
Analyzing WebRTC-related GitHub repositories allows us to track the evolution of the WebRTC ecosystem. It gives insights into active users, popular programming languages, and overall growth, ultimately providing a clear view of WebRTC’s health and development trends.
Chad explains, “I filter all of GitHub for certain keywords that indicate that it’s a WebRTC or WebRTC-related repo. Then I analyze those repos for different analyses. So, there’s different types of events, I’m familiar with pull requests and push requests, that sort of thing. So, I put them in different categories. Is it actually a code-related activity? Is it a contribution-type activity? Is it just popularity, people doing stars, or forking an issue? And well, you get a lot of insights with this.”
Media over QUIC or WebRTC?
Both Media over QUIC and WebRTC are transforming real-time media delivery. But how do they stack up against each other in today’s digital landscape? Chad shares his thoughts:
“I think Media over QUIC is trying to, well, one of the objectives of that group is to replicate or meet some of the WebRTC use cases. So there’s some overlap there. In general, it’s got a little way… It’s something I’m tracking closely. I think it’s interesting. There definitely are use cases where I think Media over QUIC would actually be better or a good complement to WebRTC. But in general, my impression so far is that it’s not ready yet. I’m not aware of anyone doing that kind of stuff in production today. I’m very interested in knowing when it will be in production.”
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for sharing videos
When it comes to sharing videos, different situations call for different approaches. Chad explains, “There’s two use cases. One is like, all right, you have predefined video clips or whatever, stuff that you know in advance that you have. It’s already done. No problem. But then in the case where maybe I want to show a video with a demo and I only finished it 10 minutes ago, there’s no time to upload it and play it back or whatever. So, I just need to be able to share that and do that. So that’s another use case. […] There’s not really one universal solution. I think it depends. Unfortunately, in some cases, you actually have to implement multiple ‘cause there’s nothing that is ideal. There’s not just one way to do it.”
WebRTC Live will be back in September, live from the RTC.on conference in Poland
Thursday, September 12 (time TBA)
