Technology

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: ~ 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: ~ 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: ~ New Windows into WebRTC with UWP: Q&A with Microsoft’s James Cadd

Posted by James Cadd on February 22, 2017
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Imaged modified from Window in Seattle airport by Flickr user Robert Scoble (CC BY-2.0)

While Windows may no longer be the default platform it was a decade ago it still has a huge and active community. More than 400 million devices support Windows 10 and there are many millions of .NET and Visual Studio users out there. In fact, I made my first WebRTC application in .NET using XSockets years ago. In addition to the couple 3rd party WebRTC libraries for WebRTC, Edge & Skype support for WebRTC/ORTC, Microsoft’s has had a few other less known and non-public WebRTC projects in the works.  Last week they publicly launched WebRTC for Universal Windows Platform (UWP), providing WebRTC support for another huge chunk of the world’s developers. I asked, James Cadd, Microsoft’s Program Manager in the Windows Developer Platform Group in charge of the project to share some details. Continue Reading

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Chrome’s WebRTC VP9 SVC Layer Cake: Sergio Garcia Murillo & Gustavo Garcia

Posted by Sergio Garcia Murillo on February 14, 2017
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Multi-party calling architectures are a common topic here at webrtcHacks, largely because group calling is widely needed but difficult to implement and understand. Most would agree Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the most advanced, but the most complex multi-party calling architecture.

To help explain how it works we have brought in not one, but two WebRTC video architecture experts. Sergio Garcia Murillo is a long time media server developer and founder of Medooze. Most recently, and most relevant for this post, he has been working on an open source SFU that leverages VP9 and SVC (the first open source project to do this that I am aware of). In addition, frequent webrtcHacks guest author and renown video expert Gustavo Garcia Bernando joins him.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Slack Does WebRTC Video – Here’s How (Gustavo Garcia)

Posted by Gustavo Garcia on December 15, 2016
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Slack is an über popular and fast growing communications tool that has a ton of integrations with various WebRTC services. Slack acquired a WebRTC company a year ago and launched its own audio conferencing service earlier this year which we analyzed here and here. Earlier this week they launched video. Does this work the same? Are there any tricks we can learn from their implementation? Long time WebRTC expert and webrtcHacks guest author Gustavo Garica takes a deeper dive into Slack’s new video conferencing feature below to see what’s going on under the hood.

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webrtcH4cKS: ~ Optimizing video quality using Simulcast (Oscar Divorra)

Posted by Chad Hart on June 16, 2016
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Dealing with multi-party video infrastructure can be pretty daunting. The good news is the technology, products, and standards to enable economical multiparty video in WebRTC has matured quite a bit in the past few years. One of the key underlying technologies enabling some of this change is called simulcast. Simulcast has been an occasional sub-topic here at webrtcHacks in the past and it is time we gave it more dedicated attention.

To do that we asked Oscar Divorra Escoda, Tokbox’s Senior Media Scientist and Media Cloud Engineering Lead to walk us through it. Tokbox was one of the first to market with a SFU and Oscar shares some of his learnings below.

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