ion-sfu VS Pion WebRTC

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

I am really excited about https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer. It has examples ready for ESP32 etc....

When working on KVS I wasn't familiar with the embedded space at all. I saw 'heavyweight' embedded where you were running on Linux. Then you had RTOS/No OS at all. I wasn't prepared for these devices at all. If we can make WebRTC work in the embedded space I think it will really accelerate what developers are able to build!

Remotely driven cars, security cameras, robots in hospitals that bring iPads to infectious patients etc... Creative people are building amazing things. The WebRTC/video space needs to work harder and support them :)

-----

I love how diverse the WebRTC space is now. Outside of this implementation you have plenty of other options!

* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc (Typescript)

* https://github.com/pion/webrtc (Golang)

* https://github.com/webrtc-rs/webrtc (Rust)

* https://github.com/algesten/str0m (Rust)

* hhttps://github.com/sepfy/libpeer (C/Embedded)

* https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/ (C++)

* https://github.com/sipsorcery-org/sipsorcery (C#)

* https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel (C++)

* https://github.com/elixir-webrtc (Elixir)

* https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc (Python)

* GStreamer’s webrtcbin (C)

See https://github.com/sipsorcery/webrtc-echoes for examples of some running against each other.

I have worked four jobs related to https://github.com/pion/webrtc and one for https://webrtcforthecurious.com

Two companies used Pion. The other two were just using the protocol (WebRTC)

In my experience Go has been relatively approachable for people that are good at PHP. It has a great standard library and a pretty solid ecosystem, though frameworks aren’t as popular in Go. There are some well regarded libraries for things like WebRTC via https://github.com/pion/webrtc WebSicket via https://github.com/nhooyr/websocket

Don't try to make RTC yourself, it looks easy, but in fact, it's a really hard problem to solve. Use https://pion.ly/ it's a pretty solid package they also have a discord/slack channel with a lot of helpful people there.

Maybe you can reuse some of this code: https://github.com/pion/webrtc/blob/master/examples/data-channels/main.go