Nowadays, building a WEBRTC video chat app can be challenging, especially at the beginning. The amount of information available may be massive, but you must understand everything to work efficiently. However, we will make every effort to clearly describe the process and all the essential steps necessary to build a fully functional peer-to-peer video call app in your browser from scratch.
Want to buy a new video communication tool but are unsure where to start? If so, here’s a checklist to help you choose the best one for your business. Let’s start by understanding the basics of a WebRTC video call.
So, What Exactly is WebRTC?
An open-source project called WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) enables real-time peer-to-peer video chat, audio, and general data communication. This technology has numerous applications. Begin with simple voice recorders and work your way up to screen sharing or video-calling applications. Using WebRTC API, you can capture one peer’s microphone and camera and send it over the internet to another peer in P2P communication.
How Does WebRTC Work?
Let’s look at the API we’ll be using. Any connection begins with an RTCPeerConnection. It acts as a bridge between a local and a remote peer. Once it is set up, it helps maintain and monitor the Connection. It is also responsible for connection failures.
Media Devices. get User Media is an asynchronous method that retrieves the user’s media devices. It allows us to record a microphone and a camera. It also requests the user’s permission to use those devices. Keep in mind that it is not restricted to RTC cuisine.
RTC Session Description — Both local and remote peers require local and remote descriptions for the connection to be established. It includes the session’s description, type, and SDP descriptor.
Finally, we have RTC ICE Candidate, which enables us to create ICE candidates. ICE is a technique that focuses on quickly establishing peer-to-peer connections. To establish a connection, both peers must agree on protocols and routing. When one of them finds a potential candidate, we must notify the other peer using the signaling server.
WebRTC Workflow
- WebRTC sends data directly between browsers, which is known as “P2P.”
- It can send audio, video, or data in real time.
- Browsers must use NAT traversal mechanisms to communicate with one another.
- P2P gets routed through a relay server (TURN)
- With WebRTC, you must consider signaling and media. They are not the same.
– One of the most notable features of the technology was its ability to support peer-to-peer (browser-to-browser) communication with minimal intervention from a server, which is typically used only for signaling.
– The group video call app allows peer-to-peer communication. A media server limits the number of streams that a client must send to one and can even limit the number of streams that a client must receive.
Servers required in a WebRTC product:
- Signaling server
- STUN/TURN servers
- Media servers (It depends on your use case)
The ICE Candidate Exchange Process
Remember that the peer receives ICE candidates from the Web Browser, which we should forward to the other peer. The connection can be established if the other peer accepts the candidate.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Peer-To-Peer Video Call
1. If you want a little more security on your calls, the directness of P2P video call app can definitely be appealing. After all, it’s nearly impossible for an outsider to crash the party if there’s only one server involved, and it’s someone who is supposed to be in the meeting.
2. For some businesses, WebRTC’s peer-to-peer video chat platform can be a more cost-effective solution. If you have the technical know-how, you can connect directly with other people and avoid the expense of cloud-based solutions, which generally comes with a monthly subscription.
3. These benefits, however, usually come at a cost. If you need to add more people to a P2P video call app, the peer network may become overburdened, resulting in a lower-quality connection.
4. Furthermore, the strength and stability of the internet service used by the people on the P2P call will limit the quality of your P2P call.
5. Webrtc video calls can only scale to a certain extent. The more people you try to bring to a meeting, the more instability you introduce into the equation.
Conclusion
To conclude, using WebRTC video chat may be challenging at first. It includes a lot of different aspects that may be difficult to grasp at first, but once you get the feel of it, it makes a lot of sense. The subject as a whole is highly complex. Luckily, we have access to an excellent Live video chat API. Apart from that, the browser and ICE servers handle all of the grunt work, making WebRTC peer-to-peer development seem less daunting.
