The Five Types of WebRTC Developers: Which do you need?
What does it take to call yourself a WebRTC Developer? Or, if you’re looking to hire or contract a WebRTC Developer, what exactly does that mean? The term WebRTC Developer can actually be a pretty broad term. It’s best to know what you need before hiring anyone who uses that title. In my experience, there are five different types of WebRTC Developers: JavaScript CPaaS IntegratorMobile Video DeveloperOpen Source Media Server DeveloperDevOps ScalerWebRTC Protocol Engineer All of
Real-Time High Performance Rendering with the Offscreen Canvas API
Offscreen Canvas is an up and coming API that allows a developer to offload canvas rendering from the main JS thread in the browser. This allows a developer to provide high resolution or graphically intensive applications directly in the browser without affecting the user’s experience. Offscreen Canvas is still a little bit experimental, and is just now becoming standard in the major browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge, making this the perfect time to introduce
Energy Efficiency in WebRTC Video Conferencing Topologies
In my previous blog post, we saw how the SFU (single forwarding unit) saves on the network congestion and client side power consumption by using forwarding via a centralized server. While there are obvious advantages to SFU, it is worth noting how it performs with regard to energy efficiency and other factors in comparison to other established video conference topologies like Mesh, Mixed (MCU), and hybrid (MCU + streaming server). Mesh Mixer (MCU)Single Forwarding (SFU)Hybrid (
Configuring FreeSWITCH as a WebRTC MCU Media Server
A Media Control Unit or MCU is the most established and time tested approach to setting up conferences via bridges. Conference bridges add centralized call and media features like mixing and quality control among other advanced controls such as a DID number, announcement, admin control, secure PIN-based access. Due to centralized media management, they are also ideal for connecting mixed streams with media pipelines for recording, broadcasting or plugging into machine learning models for transcription
Watch WebRTC Live #64: Pivoting Back to Hybrid Meetings
For our 64th episode of WebRTC Live, Arin welcomed back Lorenzo Miniero, Chairman of real-time communications experts Meetecho and Founder of the Janus WebRTC media server to discuss hybrid events, a growing and fascinating use case for WebRTC. While the topic of the day was Meetecho's experience and lessons learned in this journey there and back again to a more intensive hybrid meeting experience, the episode started with a nod to the upcoming 8th birthday
5 Factors to Consider When Choosing Your WebRTC Media Server
If you’re ready to build a WebRTC based live video application, then the most important architectural decision you need to make is what media server to use. A purely Peer-to-Peer (P2P) WebRTC video call does not require a media server. All video and audio media is transferred between the peers, and all your application has to do is establish the P2P connection using a process known as signaling. However, the vast majority of WebRTC applications
Watch WebRTC Live #63: What Have Our Own Experts Learned Lately?
After a successful first outing last year, we again invited a few members of our expert team for a roundtable to share a piece of WebRTC wisdom with our viewers. Who better to learn from than those who work with WebRTC each and every day? Alfred Gonzalez discussed refactoring a WebRTC app to scale. Increasing the number of user connections that an application can handle is an important part of our work. Alfred reviewed the
Configuring Asterisk as a WebRTC SFU Media Server
WebRTC was designed to be a peer to peer communication system. However, it gives rise to a complicated mesh system when the number of participants increases. A Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) is an alternate topology for connecting through a centralized server to route outgoing media streams from one to many users. Peer to Peer WebRTC Stream Multi-point Peer to Peer WebRTC Stream The multi-party peer to peer party configuration leads to enormous strain on a user
Announcing the WebRTC.ventures Training Program – Learn WebRTC and join our team!
Have you experimented with building WebRTC apps and wished that you could get in on one of the hottest development paths out there in 2022? Now is your chance to get free expert training on WebRTC and to join our team of WebRTC development experts! A new industrial revolution With the pandemic, the business world has been forced to make a shift to remote work and more creative business models. This is not going to
Arnaud Blogs on Twilio about creating a video chat mobile app with Twilio Video and Flutter, using BLoC
Arnaud Phommasone is a talented mobile developer that is a valuable member of our WebRTC.ventures team. He recently wrote a tutorial to create a Flutter app using an unofficial Flutter package for interfacing with Twilio Video, that will allow users to host a call and be joined by multiple other users. Flutter is Google’s free, open-source UI toolkit for building applications for mobile, web, and desktop from one single codebase. The tutorial focuses on creating a
Using DTX for Audio Optimization in Large Multi-Party Calls
In large, multi-party calls there are often just one or two main speakers. The rest of the participants are simply listening with their mic muted. The calls could be updates for shareholders, sales teams, vendors, regional offices, or factories – the use cases are endless. However, also are the number of empty audio packets going back and forth. This can cause a waste of audio bandwidth for silent participants. Handling low bandwidth scenarios to ensure the
Alberto Blogs on Twilio About Issue Diagnostics
It is hard to believe that it was under a year ago that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced that WebRTC was an official standard. Still, while it is being used by billions to communicate and was invaluable in keeping us connected during the pandemic, WebRTC is still evolving. Developers love Twilio Programmable Video because it simplifies WebRTC usage. But differences between browsers and operating systems can still be
Watch WebRTC Live #62: Notable Hacks from TADHack Global 2021
We concluded a great 2021 season of WebRTC Live by shining a light on the innovative telecommunication developers from around the world. We invited TADHack founder Alan Quayle to share his favorite hacks of TadHack Global 2021. TADHack is a great endorsement of all the work everyone in our industry is doing to make telecommunications as easy and as accessible to as many people as possible. Watch Episode #62! Save the date for WebRTC Live
Mariana Blogs on Twilio About Creating Great UX in Telehealth Applications
Building a quality telehealth application is about much more than getting the video to work. It’s about creating a reliable and trustworthy experience between a patient and their healthcare provider. Meeting tools may have the ability to deliver face-to-face video consultations but lack the crucial touch points in a patient's journey that your users deserve. In short: There’s more on the line with a healthcare application, so solid user experience (UX) design is critical. Thoughtful
Pedro Blogs on Twilio About Video App Considerations for Product Owners
Video applications are critical in today’s technology landscape and have played a crucial role in getting the world through the COVID-19 pandemic. Twilio Programmable Video is a great way to get started with building live video apps, in part because it’s straightforward for developers to use. Product owners, in particular, play a key role in their teams’ ability to deliver a high-quality video application. Thinking about items like call quality, waiting rooms, connectivity tests, and call data will
ICE Issues On Restrictive Networks and How To Alleviate Them
Recently, we faced some issues with an on-premise telehealth platform related to connectivity. It reminded us how important it is to keep your eye on the many different types of networks a peer can be utilizing and the subsequent connection issues that can arise in some particular networks. In this blog post, we will review the signaling process and share some tips on how to alleviate ICE issues that can be caused by certain network
The Vonage Conversation API and Telehealth
In a world of remote work, remote medical visits, and remote everything, the concept of completely unified communications is growing quickly. Omnichannel conversations with your bank or your doctor have moved beyond the conceptual phase and can now be implemented in a variety of ways, including via the Vonage Communications APIs. Our team at WebRTC.ventures has been using the Vonage Communications APIs for a long time. We were one of the first development partners for
How to Architect Your WebRTC Application
There is no “one size fits all” application architecture for live video applications using WebRTC. The options vary widely based on your use case and choices between commercial and open-source options for back end services. WebRTC.ventures CEO/Founder Arin Sime and CTO Alberto Gonzalez teamed up at TADSummit EMEA Americas 2021 for a presentation that covered WebRTC architectural considerations and typical use cases based on our team's experience working with a wide range of clients. Watch it
Bleeding Unit Tests
Today, with various tools and services available, developing applications with WebRTC can be done very efficiently. For example, CPaaS platforms offer a wide variety of features which abstract the complex details of WebRTC away from the developer. This enables developers to build new features very quickly. However, with rapid development, we have a greater need to maintain the code base. Automated unit tests are very good for this purpose and should be written to verify
Watch WebRTC Live #61: A Fireside Chat on the Future of WebRTC
On the November 2021 episode of WebRTC Live, Arin welcomed Callstats.io founder and (newly announced!) Daily.co Chief Product and Technology Officer, Varun Singh, to explore the future of WebRTC. Daily Co-Founder Kwindla Kramer joined the conversation as a special guest. After ten years of slow and steady increase, interest in WebRTC has been massively accelerated. The onset of the pandemic rocketed the need for real-time collaborative experiences at both small and grand scale, while at
