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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Chrome Screensharing Blues – preparing for getDisplayMedia

Posted by Philipp Hancke on June 14, 2018
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What happens when you screen share on a computer that's already sharing your screen

The Chrome Webstore has decided to stop allowing inline installation for Chrome extensions. This has quite an impact on WebRTC applications since screensharing in Chrome currently requires an extension. Will the getDisplayMedia API come to the rescue?

Screensharing in Chrome

When screensharing was introduced in Chrome 33, it required implementation via an extension as a way to address the security concerns. This was better than the previous experience of putting this capability behind a flag which lead to sites asking their users to change that flag… that got those sites an official yikes.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Smile, You’re on WebRTC – Using ML Kit for Smile Detection

Posted by Gustavo Garcia on June 11, 2018
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Now that it is getting relatively easy to setup video calls (most of the time), we can move on to doing fun things with the video stream. With new advancements in Machine Learning (ML) and a growing number of API’s and libraries out there, computer vision is also getting  easier to do. Google’s ML Kit is a recent example of a new machine learning based library that makes gives quick access to computer vision outputs.

To show how to use Google’s new ML Kit to detect user smiles on a live WebRTC stream, I would like to welcome back past webrtcHacks author and WebRTC video master  Gustavo Garcia Bernardo of Houseparty. Joining him I would like to also welcome mobile WebRTC expert, Roberto Perez of TokBox.  They give some background on doing facial detection, show some code samples, but more importantly share their learnings for optimum configuration of smile detection inside a Real Time Communications (RTC) app.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Autoplay restrictions and WebRTC (Dag-Inge Aas)

Posted by Dag-Inge Aas on May 7, 2018
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One of the great things about WebRTC is that it is built right into the web platform. The web platform is generally great for WebRTC, but occasionally it can cause huge headaches when specific WebRTC needs do not exactly align with more general browser usage requirements. The latest example of this is has to do with the autoplay of media where sound(s) suddenly went missing for many users. Former webrtcHacks guest author Dag-Inge Aas has been dealing with this first hand. See below for his write-up on browser expectations around the playback of media, the recent Chrome 66+ changes, and some tips and tricks for working around these issues.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ So your VPN is leaking because of Chrome’s WebRTC…

Posted by Philipp Hancke on April 2, 2018
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Brussel’s Mannneken Pis. Original photo by Flickr user Francisco Antunes (CC BY 2.0)

We have covered the “WebRTC is leaking your IP address” topic a few times, like when I reported what the NY Times was doing and in my WebRTC-Notifier. Periodically this topic comes up now and again in the blogosphere, generally with great shock and horror. This happened again recently, so here is an updated look into this alleged issue.

The recent blog post titled VPN Leak by voidsec highlighting how 19 out of more than 100 VPN services tested “leak” IP addresses via WebRTC is a quite interesting read. Some of the details about WebRTC are not quite correct the results are interesting nonetheless. At is core this is someone who sat down to test a long list of services and their behaviour, one by one. This is not the most exciting research task, but exhaustive studies like this often find something interesting.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Progressive Web Apps (PWA) for WebRTC (Trond Kjetil Bremnes)

Posted by Trond Bremnes on March 28, 2018
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One of WebRTC’s biggest challenges has been providing consistent, reliable support across platforms. For most apps, especially those that started on the web, this generally means developing a native or hybrid mobile app in addition to supporting the web app.  Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a new concept that promises to unify the web for many applications by allowing web-based apps to look and act like native mobile ones without introducing an intermediary hybrid framework. As will be discussed, this approach has a lot of advantages, but does it make any sense for a WebRTC app?

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ YouTube Does WebRTC – Here’s How

Posted by Philipp Hancke on March 24, 2018
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I logged into YouTube on Tuesday and noticed this new camera icon in the upper right corner, with a “Go Live (New)” option, so I clicked on it to try. It turns out you can now live stream directly from the browser. This smelled a lot like WebRTC, so I loaded up chrome://webrtc-internals to see and sure enough, it was WebRTC. We are always curious here to see how large scale deployments are implemented, so I immediately asked WebRTC reverse engineering master Philipp “Fippo” Hancke to investigate deeper. The rest here is his analysis.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Part 2: Building a AIY Vision Kit Web Server with UV4L

Posted by Chad Hart on March 6, 2018
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In part 1 of this set, I showed how one can use UV4L with the AIY Vision Kit send the camera stream and any of the default annotations to any point on the Web with WebRTC. In this post I will build on this by showing how to send image inference data over a WebRTC dataChannel and render annotations in the browser. To do this we will use a basic Python server,  tweak some of the Vision Kit samples, and leverage the dataChannel features of UV4L.

To fully follow along you will need to have a Vision Kit and should have completed all the instructions in part 1. If you don’t have a Vision Kit, you still may get some value out of seeing how UV4L’s dataChannels can be used for easily sending data from a Raspberry Pi to your browser application.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ AIY Vision Kit Part 1: TensorFlow Computer Vision on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Posted by Chad Hart on March 6, 2018
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A couple years ago I did a TADHack  where I envisioned a cheap, low-powered camera that could run complex computer vision and stream remotely when needed. After considering what it would take to build something like this myself, I waited patiently for this tech to come. Today with Google’s new AIY Vision kit, we are pretty much there.

The AIY Vision Kit is a $45 add-on board that attaches to a Raspberry Pi Zero with a Pi 2 camera. The board includes a Vision Processing Unit (VPU) chip that runs Tensor Flow image processing graphs super efficiently. The kit comes with a bunch of examples out of the box, but to actually see what the camera see’s you need to plug the HDMI into a monitor. That’s not very useful when you want to put your battery powered kit in a remote location. And while it is nice that the rig does not require any Internet connectivity, that misses out on a lot of the fun applications. So, let’s add some WebRTC to the AIY Vision Kit to let it stream over the web.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ All I want for Christmas is Hangouts to use WebRTC on Firefox

Posted by Philipp Hancke on December 21, 2017
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Tsahi discovered Hangouts on Firefox started working again and quickly called Fippo to investigate

As the year 2017 comes to an end, there was a small present. Hangouts started to support Firefox with WebRTC instead of rejecting access – plugin access had been unavailable since Firefox 53 removed NPAPI in April 2017. While it had been public for a while that the Firefox WebRTC team had been testing this, it was a nice Christmas present to see this shipped. Tsahi Levent-Levi was one of the first people to notice.
This comes at a time where other Google teams are being criticized for promoting Chrome-only experiences. Kudos to the Hangouts team for showing that you still care about the web as an open platform!

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Computer Vision on the Web with WebRTC and TensorFlow

Posted by Chad Hart on December 3, 2017
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TensorFlow is one of the most popular Machine Learning frameworks out there – probably THE most popular one. One of the great things about TensorFlow is that many libraries are actively maintained and updated. One of my favorites is the TensorFlow Object Detection API.   The Tensorflow Object Detection API classifies and provides the location of multiple objects in an image. It comes pre-trained on nearly 1000 object classes with a wide variety of pre-trained models that let you trade off speed vs. accuracy.

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