Tag Archives: Developer

WebRTC beyond one-to-one

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an-webrtchacks-logo4Originally posted on WebRTCHacks

In spite of limited specification of anything beyond one-to-one audio and video calls in WebRTC, one of the most popular usages of this technology today is multiparty video conference scenarios.   Don’t think just about traditional meeting rooms.  There are different use cases beyond meeting rooms, including e-learning, customer support, or real time broadcasting.  In each case, the core capability is being able to distribute the media streams from multiple sources to multiple destinations.   So… if you are a service provider how can you implement a multi-party topology with WebRTC endpoints?

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Doing our part for Computer Science Education Week 2013

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Obama Called. And We Responded.

Yesterday President Obama kicked off the Hour of Code Campaign for Computer Science Education Week 2013 with a inspiring video calling for every American to learn code.

Here at TokBox we are excited to help! In this post we will help you jump the next hurdle.

After learning the basics of web and/or mobile programming, most people get bogged down by technical complexity and knowledge.

Say, after building your first app, you want to add a feature to let users video chat with each other. Learning about real time video streaming itself, let alone implementing it, can take months! This is why we highly recommend playing with platforms and APIs after learning the basics of web/mobile programming. You will be able to put together interactive apps that you never thought were possible. For example, with just basic web and/or mobile programming knowledge, you can add live video chat/streaming to your web or mobile app with the right library.

There are many platforms out there that let you build technically difficult apps with basic programming knowledge. Here is a short list of our favorites that we have worked with at various hackathons. Because of these platforms, developers were able to use them and build amazing applications within 24 hours.

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OpenTok JavaScript client library 2.2 preview

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At the WebRTC Expo on November 18, we announced some new features. Since then, a number of developers have asked about how to take advantage of them. In response, we are providing a preview version of the OpenTok JavaScript client library: version 2.2. This includes an advanced look at these new features:

  • Archiving—You can record audio-video streams in a session and download the recording as an MP4 file (with H.264 video and AAC audio).
  • Dynamic frame rate control—This feature lets you reduce bandwidth usage of a Subscriber’s video stream. This reduces CPU usage and the network bandwidth consumed, and it lets you subscribe to more streams simultaneously.

These are just a couple of the new features to be included in version 2.2.

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Introducing Dynamic Frame Rate Controls

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artificial intelligence. Image shot 2008. Exact date unknown.Today we’re announcing new Intelligent Quality Controls in the OpenTok platform. To catch everyone up, Intelligent Quality Controls are the features and enhancements we’re developing to make sure that each participant in a video call has the best possible experience.

Update (Nov 25): Developers, check out our new blog post that provides details on using dynamic frame rate controls.

You may recall that over the summer we launched traffic shaping for the audio-only fallback feature. This feature drops video in low bandwidth situations to prevent a participant with poor QOS from dragging down the video quality for everyone else. Essentially, we built the automatic (video) mute button for “that guy on his cell phone in a convertible!”

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OpenTok now supports TURN over TCP

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Connectivity, we at TokBox believe, is one of the cornerstones of real-time communication applications. So we are happy to announce that we now support TURN over TCP.

There are several technologies which are used to help establish connectivity in WebRTC. The first mechanism is using a protocol called STUN. STUN uses a ping-pong mechanism to find the public IP of a client end-point so that a peer-to-peer session can be established and one can traverse a firewall. While this is useful in a number of scenarios, there are cases where one could be behind symmetric NATs, where STUN does not suffice. TURN helps in these cases. TURN is a mechanism by which real-time media can be relayed through a TURN server to punch through firewalls. OpenTok seamlessly supports STUN and TURN so a developer doesn’t have to worry about how to setup up these servers, scale them, establish connectivity etc.

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Cisco announces open-sourced version of H.264

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Cisco_logoIn the last year we’ve witnessed VP8 proponents and H.264 proponents debate which codec should become “official” for WebRTC. The main points of contention? Licensing fees associated with H.264 make it unaffordable for a non-profits like Mozilla to support. In addition, VP8 isn’t compatible with existing and legacy video conferencing platforms which are typically built to support H.264.

We saw Google draw a line in the sand early on by announcing the “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable” licensing of VP8. In addition, they recently moved their flagship video conferencing product, Google Hangouts, on to VP8.

Yesterday, Cisco unexpectedly announced that they will release an open-source version of the H.264 codec. The open-source version will include a free downloadable binary module that can be integrated into any application. All without the cost of licensing the codec [1]. This is a strategic precursor to the IETF #88 next week where a vote will take place about the MTI (mandatory to implement) video codec for WebRTC, with the dominant front-runners being VP8 and H264.

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New Pricing from TokBox

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As we announced on August 29, today TokBox introduced new pricing for the OpenTok platform. Please take a moment to check out the new pricing section of our website: http://tokbox.com/pricing.

Our new pricing starts with a 30 day free trial during which we hope developers check out everything the OpenTok platform has to offer.

Customer who wish to continue working with the OpenTok platform after the trial period can do so by entering credit card info in the account’s dashboard – or by contacting business development (bizdev@tokbox.com) for invoicing information.

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Mantis Now Launched to Production

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In April we announced our new Mantis multi-party infrastructure for Web RTC was available for pre-production trials. Since that time, hundreds of customers have logged minutes against our new infrastructure, powering multi-party OpenTok calls around the world.

We’re seeing customers connect foreign language students from across the world, build classrooms of sizes well past what off the shelf WebRTC could support, and experience more stability and quality in their multi-party conversations.

You could consider Mantis to be a media router,  but in reality it is so much more than that. As the OpenTok platform grows and evolves to better solve the use cases our customers are building, the Mantis infrastructure is going to allow us to deliver a level of quality (starting with our traffic shaping algorithms that we released in June), product enhancements (such as archiving), and other capabilities that will take WebRTC to a new level.

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Audio Fallback: Real-time Traffic Shaping with OpenTok

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feature-optimizationAt TokBox, we aim to push boundaries and deliver the best possible WebRTC-enabled experience for application developers building face-to-face video applications. One of our guiding architectural philosophies has been to provide the right primitives for developers to build rich and powerful applications. In addition, we want to make sure we abstract the underlying nuts and bolts and enable the cloud service to dynamically react to changing environmental conditions (bandwidth, packet-loss, etc.) in order to deliver the best possible experience.

The multiparty stream routing component of the OpenTok platform is also capable of shaping traffic in real time. Let’s take a look at how this this capability delivers a significantly improved quality of experience for users.

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PennApps fall 2013 TokBox winners: Will Crichton, Dillon Lareau, Patrick Xia, and Philip Garrison

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A few weeks ago on September 6, 2013, a thousand students congregated at UPenn from all over the world, laptops out and ready to code. It was one of the largest student run hackathon in history. Out of the thousand, 4 sophomore students from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) rose up to the top to win the “Best Hack That Makes Life So Easy” prize by Venmo, “Best Cloud-Connected Hack” prize by Microsoft, and our prize, “Best Use of TokBox API”.

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