One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone

http://blog.appear.in/post/87769862260/one-click-video-conversations-without-registration-on

by dagingaa • 12 years ago

42 16 12 years ago

blog.appear.in

bruun2• 12 years ago

For those interested, this was realized using the open-source Objective-C library from the WebRTC project. https://code.google.com/p/webrtc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%...

dang• 12 years ago

This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN.

Please don't ring-vote posts (i.e. solicit upvotes). Besides setting off the ring detector, doing so will eventually get your account penalized.

macNchz• 12 years ago

This is great! I've really enjoyed using the appear.in web client...I do like the zero configuration aspect, but more importantly it performs dramatically better than Skype or Google Hangouts, in terms of both CPU usage and video quality over a busy connection.

I've had many days where Hangouts was essentially unusable...stuttering, pixelated, and glitchy, but switching to an appear.in room worked nearly flawlessly, even with a group of several people. Looking forward to being able to use it on mobile!

eps• 12 years ago

Looks very tempting, but how do you make money?

tbassetto• 12 years ago

For now, I guess it's just surviving by being a subsidiary of the giant Telenor Group.

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

This is awesome. You should update the FAQ page:

"Currently iOS does not offer support in browsers for services like appear.in. We are working on exploring how we can make appear.in available for iOS. To be the first to be notified when it is available, you can sign up here (http://eepurl.com/N8Bez)."

bruun2• 12 years ago

Well spotted, thanks :-)

kirkus• 12 years ago

looks interesting...how are you storing user information?

plg• 12 years ago

how many people can join a video chat room at once?

mva• 12 years ago

"Video conversations with up to 8 people for free."

Guess there will be a paid plan later which allows more people.

return0• 12 years ago

Since it's webRTC, the traffic is point-to-point, right? I guess you would need a good connection for more than a few clients.

rahimnathwani2• 12 years ago

If two iPhone users, each behind a different NAT router with upnp enabled, use this to converse, will the media stream go directly between them, or via an appear.in server?

joeyspn• 12 years ago

"As far as we know, we are one of the first services built purely on WebRTC to launch a dedicated iOS app"

Hookflash [0] is a dedicated WebRTC iOS app that has been around since 2012 or so, and has a badass signaling layer with OpenPeer [1]... it also provides a SDK for building this kind of services in just a couple of hours.

But then you also have OpenTok [2], that has been offering a similar iOS SDK with native WebRTC stack since late 2012 / early 2013, Mashme.tv [3] also in 2013, EasyRTC in mid 2013 [4], and hundreds of similar apps and solutions that are popping up like mushrooms (AddLive, etc...) and also use WebRTC in iOS..

What I'm trying to say is that WebRTC on iOS is already a quite crowded space, and the first services were deployed years ago (late 2012)...

It would be more interesting to know what have you used in the signaling plane (websockets? pusher/pubnub? old sip?) how you have solved things like NAT traversal (TURN, ICE, Hole Punching, etc), or which solution you use for MCU...

[0] http://hookflash.com/

[1] http://openpeer.org/

[2] http://tokbox.com/opentok/

[3] http://www.mashme.tv/

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DzVqnP02zY

arb99• 12 years ago

the App store rules say:

"Apps that contain user generated content that is frequently pornographic (ex "Chat Roulette")"

Once (if) this becomes popular it will have the chat roulette problem...

evv• 12 years ago

Actually, probably not. Snapchat used to have this "problem", and they were never kicked off the app store for it.

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

not possible to get WebRTC-based services

you can use previously discussed on HN jsmpeg to do MPEG streaming and decoding in pure javascript

http://instant-webcam.com/

One-click video conversations without registration on iPhone

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