Lip-sync Issues: When a Chrome Update Fixes your Application

February 24, 2016 | By Philipp Hancke | Developer, OpenTok API, WebRTC

This post was co-authored by Gustavo Garcia Bernardo, Philipp Hancke and Charley Robinson.

When WebRTC stuff is really broken, it gets fixed very quickly.

Early in December 2015, shortly after the release of Chrome 47 to the general public, we started to notice a subtle and strange behavior in the Audio/Video of streams during our many daily meetings using WebRTC: the video occasionally wouldn’t stay caught up with the corresponding audio. As with many bugs noticed internally by developers, it took a while for any of us to believe that what we were seeing was a real issue. We call this the inverse of productive dogfooding: rather than assume we are just like our users, we can just as easily decide we are nothing like them.

How to get a WebRTC Diagnostic Recording from Chrome 49+

February 22, 2016 | By Philipp Hancke | Developer, New Products & Features, WebRTC

Have you ever had to support a WebRTC application and needed to get packet dumps from the user? Wireshark is a great tool for this, but asking a user to install it and make a dump rarely works. It’s just too complicated. So I was pretty excited when I read the Chrome 49 release notes which described (not in much detail) a new feature called the ‘RTC event log’. This is described as follows:

We now provide a new debug option in chrome://webrtc-internals for tracing internal details (e.g., BWE, jitter buffer state) for audio and video sessions. This option creates a log containing the timing and headers of packets as well as the timing of various internal events. We hope this will help resolve issues related to media transport and jitter buffers; attaching this log when reporting such issues will help us tremendously.

TokBox at the Largest Hackathon in History

February 17, 2016 | By Eleanor Hermon | Developer, Events

The Event

Set to be the largest hackathon in history , TokBox is proud to be sponsoring the Koding & Hacksummit hackathon, February 20-21. More than 25,000 teams will participate in the hackathon for a chance to win some amazing prizes.

The Challenges

Participants can use any publicly available API to create something that fits into the theme of data visualization, productivity or gaming.

TokBox at Mobile World Congress

February 5, 2016 | By Eleanor Hermon | Events, The OpenTok Platform

With the mobile market booming, there are increasingly exciting opportunities to innovate with WebRTC for mobile and an ever growing range of devices. Here at TokBox we are continuing to evolve our offerings and we’re seeing more and more of our customers building applications with embedded communications with mobile at their core. That’s why we’re looking forward to attend Mobile World Congress this year, the world’s largest industry event.

The optk Developer Command Line Utility

February 2, 2016 | By Ankur Oberoi | Code Sample, Developer, The OpenTok Platform

When I’m working on developing an OpenTok application, I want to move fast. As a software engineer, I have loads of little workflow shortcuts, scripts, tricks, and favorite tools. When I started to build optk, I wanted to shave off just a couple seconds off of something that I had to do dozens of times a day.

I usually start my OpenTok project building the client, whether that be using the OpenTok JavaScript SDK, iOS SDK, or Android SDK. A button here, a label there, fill out the menu, and then add some WebRTC-powered streaming goodness. At that point I’m not worried about how Sessions and Tokens are going to be generated, that’s a concern for my server, and I’ll solve that after I have some basic tangible UX.

Crowdcast: Live Video Events That Don’t Suck

January 25, 2016 | By Lauren Slattery | Broadcast, OpenTok API, Partner News

The evolution of live video has spawned new and engaging ways for brands, organizations and people to connect with their audience. Whether it’s participating in a team meeting held remotely, hosting a virtual conference for hundreds of people all over the world, demo-ing a new product to customers via a webinar, or broadcasting a live stream of an event, there is no question live video is now becoming a standard feature in any business or entrepreneur’s communication toolkit.

TechTok: Driving Growth with Engagement Automation for Mobile Applications

January 8, 2016 | By Eleanor Hermon | Events, TechTok

What are the biggest challenges for mobile app developers? And why does success with mobile remain so elusive?

At this month’s TechTok, Streethawk CEO, David Jones, will be answering some of these questions. He’ll be talking to us about how top apps use engagement automation to drive growth, focusing on virality, look-a-likes & referral programs as well as big recurring issues including:

• User retention

• Cost of paid acquisition

• Why referral growth has been constrained until now

• Onboarding and engagement tactics

New Release: OpenTok iOS & Android 2.7.0

January 5, 2016 | By Eleanor Hermon | Android, iOS SDK, New Products & Features, The OpenTok Platform

We’re happy to announce that we recently made available OpenTok mobile SDKs 2.7.0 for iOS and Android. Improvements have been made in three main areas: Xcode 7 and iOS 9 support, quality and reliability and ease of use of the library.

Now let’s jump into all the details:

Platform specific

Xcode 7 and iOS 9 support

A beta bitcode version of the OpenTok iOS SDK is now available here. For more information about this update you can check out our blog post. If you have any comments or need to report any issues, please contact us at: ios-bitcode-beta@tokbox.com.

White paper: The Real-Time Revolution in e-Learning

December 25, 2015 | By Eleanor Hermon | Case Studies, Education, White paper

It is estimated that by 2019 50% of all higher ed classes will be delivered online. So there’s no doubt that education, both in and outside of the classroom, is entering a whole new era.

The first wave of e-Learning impacted education, bringing educational resources online. But the second wave – active e-Learning using technologies like WebRTC – is set to revolutionize it, creating new interactive experiences with communications in context. In the real world, this means that a student in Detroit can now be tutored in calculus by a math teacher in New York or college students at MIT, UCLA, and Oxford collaborate together on an article to be submitted to a renowned academic journal.

TechTok catch up – Changing the face of robotics

December 24, 2015 | By Eleanor Hermon | Events, TechTok, The OpenTok Platform

At this month’s TechTok, the team from Revolve Robotics came along to talk about all things robots: how robotics have changed and continue to do so, the evolution and potential of telepresence robots, as well as how you can leverage the OpenTok platform and Kubi robotics capabilities to build powerful and engaging telepresence robots.

Revolve Robotics CTO, Ilya Polykov, and CEO, Marcus Rosenthal spoke about their integration of OpenTok and Kubi. If this is something you are working on or are interested in, check out their API. If you’re developing an app based on the OpenTok platform and want to use Kubi, this API will help you make this happen in a matter of days.

If you’re interested in buying your own Kubi robot, you can get $100 off your online purchase using the promo code ‘tokbox’ at checkout for a limited time only.