Pion WebRTC VS peerjs

Hey HN,

For the past couple of years I have been working on open source software[0] + a free book[1] to make WebRTC easier. I am trying to find the other gaps in the space. Would love to hear what people find difficult about it still!

Even if you don't have a solution would be great just to get a feel for where people are at in the space.

[0] https://github.com/pion/webrtc

[1] https://webrtcforthecurious.com

I started (but many many others contributed) to the Go implementation of WebRTC Pion WebRTC https://github.com/pion/webrtc

Along the way I worked on a Go implemenation of DTLS that gets used on its own a bit https://github.com/pion/dtls

In another life I wrote Therac https://github.com/sean-der/therac. A PHP debugger that was viewable from a browser. I was a remote at the time (2015) and it was a great tool to use with others.

I also wrote fail2web https://github.com/sean-der/fail2web a web frontend to fail2ban

I'm currently building a new product with .NET 5 that creates a WebRTC data channel with clients and also sends them video over WebRTC. In preparation, I evaluated the current WebRTC landscape. The gist is that almost all WebRTC implementations are in other languages (usually C++), so native interop is nearly unavoidable if you want to use C#. I ultimately decided to create a small native library (.so file) using the excellent Pion WebRTC library for Go and then created a C# wrapper for it using C#'s native interop APIs (e.g. DllImport, Marshal.GetFunctionPointerForDelegate()). So far this has been working well and I have both data communication and video streams working, but I should add the caveat that I haven't shipped the service to production yet (I'm still a couple months of development away from that).

I meant to mention: I thought about creating an open-source library for the Pion wrapper, but it's currently quite specific to my application in order to reduce the number of calls needed from C# to Go and vice versa. Perhaps I'll write a blog post in the future, though. In the meantime, the approach I took was to start with one of Pion's examples and then turn it into a static library by using cgo to export functions with C linkage and building it as a shared library like this:

Your best bet would be GStreamer or ffmpeg. I made a simple example using Pion WebRTC here

Sadly I have no experience with Godot. In any case, you need a server to make the connection between the peers. As you put yourself, prior to an established connection the two parties can't find one another on the web. As long as your game isn't big enough to pay for a server, you could use https://peerjs.com/ 's.

Depending on your actual requirements there might be plenty of options… What about: https://peerjs.com/

Peerjs library for webRTC

[Disclosure: I'm a developer evangelist at Agora] WebRTC is awesome, it enables you to do peer-to-peer communication without having to deal with a lot of the network topology details. You can even use a framework like PeerJS to simplify your implementation.

Check out https://peerjs.com/. It's a good library, especially for one-on-one calls. It's P2P. When you start adding more users, it does tend to cause some performance issues, but it works well for smaller projects.

Fun fact about PeerJS, you'll need a server in order to use it (look into STUN/TURN/ICE for more info). The maintainer seems to be hosting one default instance that goes down from time to time. https://github.com/peers/peerjs/issues/671 https://github.com/peers/peerjs/issues/693

If you're looking to do "pure" P2P in the browser, we're not there yet as we cannot accept incoming connections without something in between right now.