webRTC for Live Broadcast

[Dan Regan]

Hi All,

I'm a broadcast engineer working in live television. I'm very new to this world of webRTC. Over the last few months I've been building some simple chat rooms and exploring the Janus project.

I'm interested in first setting something very simple. I'd like to be able to capture some media (from a blackmagic PCI card) could be a webcam to being with and display it in browser. I'd then like to be able to view it on other devices on the same LAN. The application being for low latency local motioning of studio outputs.

Next I'd like to implement this onto a WAN using something like Janus as the STUN/TURN server.

The final idea I'd like to explore, is to be able to have people contribute in by streaming their webcam or phone camera, in browser, to a local server which can output the stream via a blackmagic capture card. I've used OBS-webRTC to achieve something similar to this, but have been told the FFmpeg could do a straight webRTC > SDI output.

If anyone is interested in getting involved with this, or could start by pointing me in the right direction, that would be greatly appreciated. It's all really exciting stuff and I'm looking forward to understanding it more.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Dan

[Lorenzo Miniero]

Hi Dan,

not sure if you've seen it already, but we've started experimenting with WebRTC->NDI using Janus:

https://www.meetecho.com/blog/webrtc-ndi/

Nothing open source, at the moment, and I'm not sure whether we'll open source it at all (we need to first work on it a bit more), but there may be something of interest to you there. Also check RTP forwarders for ways to get Janus to relay media behind the curtains to ffmpeg:

https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/janus/

Lorenzo

[Dan Regan]

Hi Lorenzo,

Yes I got very excited to see these projects. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes in the future.

Here's a question, once the connection is established, would there be a way to add a button in browser to toggle the microphone source between the left and right channels of the stream. This means we could build in some simple communications facilities to the system. Using the left channel as their live mic source and then when they press the button it switches it away to the right, which we could use as a direct talk to someone off air.

Dan