GoCast WebRTC beta - come give it a try

[Robert Wolff (GoCast)]

We are happy to announce the availability of GoCast.it public beta. Our main website is http://www.gocast.it where you can read more about our efforts. Come try the product itself directly at http://study.gocast.it  - This HTML5 application shows some of the possibilities for using WebRTC in real-world settings. We include a number of cool features such as:
- Public and private chat
- Interactive/collaborative whiteboard
- Multi-way peer-audio/video connections of up to 12 participants
- Video effects such as sepia, black and white, and regular color
- Microphone-muting
- Video-muting
- A settings page
- An interactive tour
- Facebook login integration
- Sharing on your wall and messaging friends to join your study room
- Ability to simply share a URL with anyone to have them join you immediately

 More features are in the works, but please come check it out and use it to your hearts' content. The servers seem pretty stable lately. The product requires the use of Firefox or Chrome currently with Safari and IE in the coming-soon-phase and it does employ a plug-in of WebRTC currently in order to function. Once WebRTC is in production level browsers, we'll get a version out there which will automatically switch between built-in-WebRTC and plug-in based on capability. We're pretty happy with it as beta tests go! If you have any comments, you can even give feedback directly in the application and if you run into troubles or a crash, you can also send a bug-report/log directly using the bug report button in the upper left.

For the techno-curious, we're employing Amazon EC2 servers with an Openfire XMPP server for signalling and room management. A BOSH server is employed to mitigate firewall connectivity issues with Strophe used on the client side. Additionally, node.js is employed to customize this communications experience giving great control over the lifecycle of an online study-room. Lastly - we do have an open source area of our website which unfortunately is out of date. Sigh. We'll be updating that area as time permits in the coming weeks to include the plugin codebase we use for the product.

Thanks!
Bob Wolff and the GoCast.it crew.

[Justin Uberti]

WebRTC is now available in Chrome 23 Beta, and will hit the stable channel in a couple weeks. Do you think you can support the built-in WebRTC by then?

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[medusade]

Cool, didn't see this on your forum though...

[Kyle Cummings]

Are there any plans to update the github repo to the code that implements XMPP signaling via an Openfire server? If so, do you know about when you will release the code?

[Robert Wolff (GoCast)]

Hey medusade,
Unfortunately, our forum board was overrun by spam-bots. Finding signal in the noise became quite a task. :-\  Not sure what we'll be doing to revive it yet.

bob

[Robert Wolff (GoCast)]

Kyle,
We do plan on updating the github repo with our plugin and also with a compatibility-shim which would allow folks to have interop between WebRTC-enabled browsers and non-enabled browsers through a single API which is identical or nearly-so to the current w3c proposal. As for our signalling with the XMPP server - not sure yet what portions will get open sourced and which will stay proprietary. Stay tuned. :)

Thanks!
Bob Wolff - http://study.gocast.it/?roomname=webrtc