libdatachannel VS janus-gateway

Node.js node JavaScript runtime itself provides a means to interface with native applications. Plenty of people write their own WebSocket or WebRTC data channel libraries https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel.

Fourtunately some technologies and API's are extensible enough to do whatever you want in spite of and to overcome limitations; e.g., WebRTC (particularly data channels https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel), Native Messaging, WebTransport, fetch(), Trasnferable Streams, Media Capture Transform, File API, File System Access API, Web extensions.

To be fair, C++ has libdatachannel which I like using too.

https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel ?

Or use something specific like libdatachannel https://libdatachannel.org/

If you’re using WebRTC data channels in a client server config then infra is no more complex than a regular setup because the server will almost certainly have an external facing IP address.

People should really try using WebRTC as well because you can get the full pipeline setup for a toy demo in a couple of slow days. I did whilst also writing my own signalling server in Go without having used Go before!

It’s certainly not any more complex than rolling all the stuff the article is talking about on top of raw UDP.

This does use a real WebRTC stack (specifically libdatachannel - https://libdatachannel.org). Under the hood this is making real WebRTC connections.

But I guess you mean why it doesn't mock using real peers in the browser where the tests are happening, using the browser's existing stack there?

There's a few reasons I've avoided that:

* Primarily: I want to do things that the browser APIs won't let you do. E.g. sending invalid data, or intentionally causing various types of errors. The browser APIs are designed to stop you doing the wrong thing, by keeping the raw data at arm's length. Very sensible for normal WebRTC usage, but bad for testing edge cases and breaking things.

Building WebRTC tends to be hell. If your use case is simple enough, it might be interesting to switch to an alternative C++ library like libdatachannel (I'm the author).

You can, in theory, get UDP-like characteristics out of a different web API - with a WebRTC datachannel configured to be unreliable and unordered. I haven't seen anybody use that API just because it's a pretty big pain to use. The developer of Agar IO called it too hard to use in a HackerNews comment, but nowadays there's simpler libraries than the ones he had in 2016 like webrtc-unreliable and libdatachannel. You still need to run a STUN/TURN server and the integration is easier than it was back then, but still much harder than raw UDP sockets though.

exit(EXIT_SUCCESS); } char message[message_length]; fread(message, message_length, sizeof(char), stdin); string m(message, message + sizeof message / sizeof message[0]); return json::parse(m); } // Encode a message for transmission, given its content. message_t encode_message(json content) { string encoded_content = content.dump(); message_t m; m.content = encoded_content; m.length = (uint32_t)encoded_content.length(); return m; } // Send an encoded message to stdout. void send_message(message_t encoded_message) { char *raw_length = reinterpret_cast(&encoded_message.length); fwrite(raw_length, 4, sizeof(char), stdout); fwrite(encoded_message.content.c_str(), encoded_message.length, sizeof(char), stdout); fflush(stdout); } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { while (true) { json message = get_message(); auto command = message.get(); // https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel/issues/544#issuecomment-1024739214 // https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp\_questions/comments/swr1tk/comment/hxral9f/ FILE *pipe = popen(command.c_str(), "r"); while (true) { size_t bufferSize = 1024; byte buffer[bufferSize]; size_t count; while ((count = fread(buffer, 1, bufferSize, pipe)) > 0) { stringstream data; // S16NE PCM from parec to integers in JSON array data << "["; for (size_t i = 0; i < count; i++) { data << (int)buffer[i]; if (i < count - 1) { data << ","; } } data << "]"; // send JSON array to Native Messaging local client send_message(encode_message(data.str())); } } } }

I've been looking into Janus WebRTC Server due to the ability for Uv4L to join Janus rooms (I'm building a RaspberyyPi doorbell)

A related answer to the above is to check out Janus. It's a general purpose WebRTC server that has RTMP and FTL ingest support. I think it's also batteries not included, but I think it's what Glimesh is based on.

I've been using Janus gateway for similar. Pretty easy to setup.

A number of open-source projects also exist, which give developers a great head start if they're looking to build their own infrastructure - the most popular of these include Jitsi, Mediasoup, Janus, and Pion. These projects provide a layer of abstraction and expose a number of helper functions to perform various tasks, such as creating transports, etc. They have helpful guides on how to get started, but you would still face the aforementioned issues regarding scaling, resources, etc.

Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there. https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.

- Janus (C / C++)

You can also take a look at https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway which can help you implement the video call part (as well as more traditional rtc scenario)

You can try janus https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/