Cross-Platform Video Conferencing

[Dean Martin]

A) I am in need to do cross-platform video conferencing. E.g. web client and wpf client video chatting. Possible? If yes... how? B) If yes, Could i grab each frame of the stream and convert it to an image file (to process for e.g. object tracking) on the wpf client? if yes, how? :)

[Ulf Björklund]

Hi Dean

A) Possible, absolutely. But I wonder if you are talking about WebRTC with Audio/Video peer 2 peer? XSockets WebRTC stuff is a open source project that supports communication between browsers peer 2 peer via the WebRTC technology that the browsers support (Chrome, FF, Opera). We have not created a official client for WPF etc, but there is a project started around it. It has low priority and there is no date for its completion.

B) Yes, that is possible and is also done today by our users/customers, but for all I know they use it to send pictures only. There is no audio.
That part is actually very easy to do. I would recommend a custom protocol to get the best performance possible. WebSockets do masking and you will get better perf writing a custom protocol that send bytes directly over the socket.

Since you ask the (B) part I think that you might now talk about WebRTC...? Since WebRTC never touches the server. WebRTC is peer 2 peer. If you ignore WebRTC and use XSockets you can send video and audio over xsockets and then you will be able to process the images on the server.

My answers might raise another set of questions, so feel free to ask some more if needed. :)

Regards

Uffe  

[Daniele Prestianni]

Hello Uffe,
I want integrate XSockets into Unity game engine in order to apply your technology on multiplayer gaming.
I'm interested on peer-to-peer communication, so could you give more about the WebRTC client for WPF; is there the source code?
Using these code I will able to establish WebRTC communications with Unity clients and other No-Unity clients.
Thanks for your support.

[Ulf Björklund]

Hi Daniele

I am currently not sure on what .NET framework verison Unity is? Last time I checked it was .NET 2.0.

We do have an unofficial .NET 2.0 client for XSockets, I am about to update it to be official with XSockets v5.

WebRTC in XSockets is a open source part of XSockets. There is no client for WPF, but we have a internal project for connecting other clients than browsers. For example WPF or any other clients that can provide a stream to be attached.

So, webrtc is a very small part of XSockets and it makes very much sense to use XSockets for communication (text/binary) in Unity, but having video/audio will be a bigger challenge.

Everything is possible, but adding WebRTC to a WPF client is not official or at all supported today. See part (A) of my previous answer in this thread.

To be honest WebRTC is not our focus at all, our focus is communication between anything that has TCP/IP. So building a WebRTC P2P protocol between anything is doable since it is just a plugin, but there would be a lot of work with the video codecs etc.

Regards

Uffe