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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Accelerated Computer Vision inside a WebRTC Media Server with Intel OWT

Posted by Chad Hart on April 3, 2020
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WebRTC has made getting and sending real time video streams (mostly) easy. The next step is doing something with them, and machine learning lets us have some fun with those streams. Last month I showed how to run Computer Vision (CV) locally in the browser. As I mentioned there, local is nice, but sometimes more performance is needed so you need to run your Machine Learning inference on a remote server. In this post I’ll review how to run OpenCV models server-side with hardware acceleration on Intel chipsets using Intel’s open source Open WebRTC Toolkit (OWT). ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not..

Posted by Philipp Hancke on April 1, 2020
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Time for another opinionated post. This time on… end-to-end encryption (e2ee). Zoom apparently claims it supports e2ee while it can not satisfy that promise. Is WebRTC any better?

Zoom does not have End to End Encryption

Let’s get to the bottom of things fast: Boo Zoom!

I reviewed how Zoom’s implements their web client last year.

I’m not really surprised of their general lack of e2ee given that their web client did not provide any encryption on top of TLS or WebRTC’s DataChannel. For reasons we will discuss below, this means they weren’t doing any obvious e2ee there. ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Stop touching your face using a browser and TensorFlow.js

Posted by Chad Hart on March 19, 2020
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faetouchmonitor

Don’t touch your face! To prevent the spread of disease, health bodies recommend not touching your face with unwashed hands. This is easier said than done if you are sitting in front of a computer for hours.  I wondered, is this a problem that can be solved with a browser?

We have a number of computer vision + WebRTC experiments here. Experimenting with running computer vision locally in the browser using TensorFlow.js has been on my bucket list and this seemed like a good opportunity. A quick search revealed somebody already thought of this 2 week ago. That site used a model that requires some user training – which is interesting but can make it flaky. It also wasn’t open source for others to expand on, so I did some social distancing via coding isolation over the weekend to see what was possible. ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Private Home Surveillance with the WebRTC DataChannel (Ivelin Ivanov)

Posted by Ivelin Ivanov on February 25, 2020
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When most people think of WebRTC they think of video communications. Similarly, home surveillance is usually associated with video streaming. That’s why I was surprised to hear about a home security project that leverages WebRTC not for video streaming, but for the DataChannel. WebRTC’s DataChannel might not demo as well as a video call, but as you will see, it is a very convenient way to setup peer-to-peer information transfer.

Ivelin Ivanov is a long-time open source contributor in a variety of projects and organizations like RedHat, Mobicents, and Telestax. Recently he started to address some home IoT privacy concerns with a new open source project, Ambianic. His project includes many interesting elements, including computer vision on a Raspberry Pi (one of my favorite topics), but for this post I asked him to talk about how he leveraged WebRTC and the DataChannel in his architecture. ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Not a Guide to SDP Munging

Posted by Philipp Hancke on February 11, 2020
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SDP has been a frequent topic, both here on webrtcHacks as well as in the discussion about the standard itself. Modifying the SDP in arcane ways is referred to as SDP munging. This post gives an introduction into what SDP munging is, why its done and why it should not be done. This is not a guide to SDP munging.

Want to keep up on our latest posts? Please click here to subscribe to our mailing list if you have not already. We only email post updates. You can also follow us on twitter at @webrtcHacks for blog updates. ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Perfect Negotiation

Posted by Chad Hart on February 5, 2020
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Series preface: We generally lean toward long posts here at webrtcHacks, but not all interesting topics warrant a lot of new text. Sometimes briefer is better. So to better address the many topics that fit into this category, we are starting a new Minimum Duration series. Here is our first post under this set covering Perfect Negotiation.

What is Perfect Negotiation and why do we need it?

Long ago the WebRTC specification designers settled on leaving the signaling communication mechanism between two WebRTC peers up to the application. This means your code needs to handle passing Session Description Protocol (SDP) back and forth and giving that to the peerConnection API. Today WebRTC implementations also almost universally use Trickle-ICE, a form of Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE), which passes potential network paths between those peers asynchronously so a connection can be established as soon as possible. The asynchronous but time sensitive nature of all this means it is possible for glare conditions to occur – situations where both sides are making updates at the same time causing their state machines to get out of sync. Differences in how developers implement their code and browsers variances make this worse. ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Does Chromium-based Edge’s WebRTC Look Like Chrome?

Posted by Chad Hart on January 16, 2020
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WebRTC has a new browser – kind of. Yesterday Microsoft’s  “new” Edge browser based on Chromium – commonly referred to Edgium – went GA. This certainly will make life easier for WebRTC developers since the previous Edge had many differences from other implementations. The big question is how different is Edgium from Chrome for WebRTC usage?

The short answer is there is no real difference, but you can read below for background details on the tests I ran. If you’re new around WebRTC the rundown may give you some ideas for testing your own product. ...

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ How Zoom’s web client avoids using WebRTC (DataChannel Update)

Posted by Philipp Hancke on September 8, 2019
Posted in: Reverse-Engineering.
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Rube Goldberg’s Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931)

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on October 23, 2018. Zoom recently started using WebRTC’s DataChannels so we have added some new details at the end in the DataChannels section.

Zoom has a web client that allows a participant to join meetings without downloading their app. Chris Koehncke was excited to see how this worked (watch him at the upcoming KrankyGeek event!) so we gave it a try. It worked, removing the download barrier. The quality was acceptable and we had a good chat for half an hour. ...

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