awesome-pion VS ion-sfu

I see a lot of WebRTC usage just in the LAN. WebRTC sees a lot of usage outside of conferencing!

* Controlling Robots (formant.io)

* Security Cameras

* File Sharing

* Game Streaming/VNC

I keep a list of interesting open source WebRTC projects at https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion

For more interesting related projects, you may also want to checkout https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion

I'm fiddling now and then on an alternative conferencing frontend(Pyrite - https://github.com/garage44/pyrite) for Galene(https://galene.org), which is a SFU that uses Pion.

AV1 support is already available in libwebrtc!

So when I started building Pion the target use case was to make it easier to build scalable servers. Instead of interacting with a WebRTC servers REST API to query information/load balance I wanted to have it all in one code base. It also is really useful to have Media+Transport decoupled. Lots of use cases I didn't realize grew out of that.

* Teleoperation/robotics (https://github.com/Ragnar-H/TelloGo)

* Control remote software (https://github.com/m1k1o/neko)

* Cross platform file sharing (https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole)

* Sending pre-recorded media (RTMP/HLS/RTSP -> WebRTC)

* Custom DataChannel servers/bridges (https://snowflake.torproject.org/)

Lots of other cool ones in https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion I need to update it. It has been a bit since I have looked through https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/pion/webrtc/v3?tab=importedby

Pion WebRTC is a Go implementation of WebRTC. If you haven't used it before check out awesome-pion or example-webrtc-applications for what people are doing. We maintain a feature list and other helpful resources in our README.md

There's nothing particularly difficult on the server side — a quality SFU should be capable to handle on the order of 400 video flows per core, and there are quite a few high-quality free software SFUs available (Janus, Jitsi, ion-sfu, livekit, Galene). To give some perspective: we're using Galene for lectures, and our single-CPU server uses around 40% CPU usage in a room with 120 students (who keep their cameras switched off during the lecture, of course, and only occasionally switch them on to ask questions).

As the grandparent mentioned, the problem is the client side. Since there is no standard videoconferencing protocol, every free software project needs to develop their own clients. And it's difficult for a free software project to have the manpower and expertise to develop quality clients for the web, Android and iOS, so in effect what we currently have are mostly half-baked web clients.

There is some hope, though. The IETF have been working on standard protocols for ingress (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/wish/), and if their protocols get deployed, you'll be able to use the same streaming software (think OBS) or IP camera with multiple distinct videoconferencing servers. An interoperable interactive videoconferencing protocol is nowhere near, but as more people understand videoconferencing technology, there is some hope that people will get together and start working on multi-protocol clients (remember Pidgin?).

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Galene (https://galene.org), and I've been actively participating in the Pion community (https://github.com/pion/webrtc) and collaborating with the authors of ion-sfu (https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu) and LiveKit (https://github.com/livekit).

go get: module github.com/pion/ion-sfu@upgrade found (v1.10.8), but does not contain package github.com/pion/ion-sfu/cmd/server/grpc/proto

Really appreciate that they have a Protocol project, really helps quickly get a sense of what's under the hood. It's just a bunch of protobuf messages, but that's a super helpful reference, and nice to not have it embedded in one of the various other projects: https://github.com/livekit/protocol

Notably using the well known extremely well reputed super battle hardened Pion sfu, ion: https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu