• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity
    1. State of WebRTC outside of major browsers

      I've been trying to set up a reliable lightweight solution for high quality, low-latency webcam (v4l2) streaming from Linux server to browsers, allowing for small (1-5) number of concurrent...

      I've been trying to set up a reliable lightweight solution for high quality, low-latency webcam (v4l2) streaming from Linux server to browsers, allowing for small (1-5) number of concurrent viewers.

      The obvious choice here is WebRTC, which when used through browser APIs, works wonderfully. It has low latency and automatic quality adjustment depending on network performance.
      I also checked out RTSP and RTMP, which are not supported without browser plugins. Next candidates were DASH and HLS, but while they provide high quality, they also have high latency.
      For a while I used MPEG1 streaming through Websockets (using jsmpeg library), which worked and had low latency, but the video quality was bad.

      Back to WebRTC - It seems like reliable, lightweight and maintained projects are really hard to find. So far I've found a few WebRTC media servers, but they're overkill for my use case:

      • Janus
      • MediaSoup
      • Kurento (unmaintained)

      I also tried implementing this functionality using low level Gstreamer elements in Python using PyGObject, but that's proving to be rather complicated with a ton of extremely low level implementation details.

      If anyone has tried doing something similar, I'd really like to hear what (if any) problems you had and if you found any sane solutions. Next thing on my list is using headless Chromium in combination with Puppeteer, but I'd really prefer more lightweight solutions.

      9 votes
    2. Youtube Alternatives

      Youtube has a giant lead in the online video streaming market and in spite of many controversies (demonetization, click bait being promoted to peoples' front pages, etc.) there doesn't seem to be...

      Youtube has a giant lead in the online video streaming market and in spite of many controversies (demonetization, click bait being promoted to peoples' front pages, etc.) there doesn't seem to be any indication that this is going to change. What do you think about the future of this industry? Which (if any) providers have a chance to become viable competitors to YouTube?

      13 votes
    3. Fallacy of "Just because _ doesn't mean _"

      I see this a lot on the internet these days. The phrase "just because [some agreed-upon statement], it doesn't mean that [contested statement]." That's fine when used correctly, but I've seen a...

      I see this a lot on the internet these days. The phrase "just because [some agreed-upon statement], it doesn't mean that [contested statement]."

      That's fine when used correctly, but I've seen a lot of cases where it's used in a questionable way and people just jump on board with the phrase anyway.

      I saw it again today in a conversation about video games, and one game in particular that everybody loves to hate. Someone said "I enjoy this game though," and someone else said "Just because you enjoy a game doesn't mean it's good."

      Now, the impulse is to agree with the second statement because agreeing that there might be hidden subtlety in a matter is almost always safe, and nearly everyone involved in the conversation upvoted/reacted positively to that statement.

      But the statement was really used to say "your opinion is wrong because there might be hidden subtleties that make me right," which seems like a fallacious position to me, or at least a pretty meaningless one. And when you stop to think about what was said, you realize that in fact, enjoying a video game might indeed be the most important, if not the only, metric in assessing its quality.

      But the inclination to agree with anyone using the "just because, doesn't mean" format is definitely there I think. I'm not sure if that falls under the category of some other identifiable fallacy or not, but I thought I'd see what others thought.

      8 votes