WebRTC Revolution in progress!

Bistri Team June 26, 2014 engineering No comments

In 2013, Bistri was the first WebRTC Vendor to publish statistics on a real usage on a production platform, based on 1.5 Million minutes of Video Calls.

But a lot has changed since last year. In addition to Google Chrome, 2 major web browsers have joined the WebRTC movement, Mozilla Firefox then Opera, enabling WebRTC on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and Android. Thanks to Temasys’s Vendor-Independent Plugin, WebRTC works now on IE & Safari for desktops as well.

This year, the Bistri team has analyzed more than 6 months of data covering over 6 Million minutes of One-to-One Video Calls. Results are summarized and illustrated in the infographic below.

Major take-away: 76% of video-calls using WebRTC compared to 13% last year with an average call length of 17 minutes per call for the last 6 months. When the quality of the video and the audio is really good, people lose all notion of time…
Last but not least, 92% of those calls are P2P with no relay.

In the next months we will be able to measure if people prefer a no-plugin experience with Flash or if they are willing to download a plugin enabling WebRTC features within their default browser.

WebRTC Statistics June 2014 Infographic

VP8 Hardware Acceleration for WebRTC

Bistri Team June 22, 2014 engineering 1 comment

This is a list of systems with dedicated VP8 support. They should make a difference in terms of speed and power usage.

CompatibilityMatrix

Vendor	Model	Core	Multicore	VP8 Decode	VP8 Encode
Allwinner	A1x	Cortex-A8	Single	Yes	No
Allwinner	A20	Cortex-A7	Dual	Yes	No
Allwinner	A31	Cortex-A7	Quad	Yes	No
Broadcom	BCM2835	ARM11	Dual	Yes	No
Broadcom	BCM2763	ARM11		Yes	No
Broadcom	BCM28150	Cortex-A9		Yes	No
DSP Group	XpandR III	Cortex-A8	Single	Yes	No
Freescale Semiconductor	i.MX 6	Cortex-A9	Dual	Yes	No
Huawei	K3V2	Cortex-A9	Quad	Yes	No
InfoTM	IMAPX220/210/200	ARM11		Yes	No
Intel	Bay Trail	Cortex-A7		Yes	No
Leadcore	LC181			Yes	No
Marvell	Armada 1xxx			Yes	No
Mediatek	MT5369			Yes	No
Mediatek	MT6250			Yes	No
Nufront	NS115	Cortex-A9	Dual	Yes	No
nVidia	Tegra 4	Cortex-A15	Quad	Yes	Yes
Qualcomm	Snapdragon 800	ARM7	Quad	Yes	Yes
Rockchip	RK29xx	Cortex-A8	Single	Yes	No
Rockchip	RK30xx	Cortex-A9	Dual	Yes	Yes
Rockchip	RK3188	Cortex-A9	Quad	Yes	No
Samsung	Exynos 5 Dual 5250	Cortex-A15	Dual	Yes	No
Silicon Integrated Systems	SiS9610		Single	Yes	No
Spreadtrum	SC6820, SC6825	Cortex-A5	Single	Yes	No
STMicroelectronics	SPEAr1340	Cortex-A9	Dual	Yes	No
ST-Ericsson	NovaThor LT9540	Cortex-A9	Dual	Yes	Yes
Texas Instruments	OMAP5 Series	Cortex-A15	Dual	Yes	No
ZiiLABS	ZMS-20	Cortex-A9	Dual	Yes	No
ZiiLABS	ZMS-40	Cortex-A9	Quad	Yes	No

New WebRTC Screen Sharing for Chrome

Bistri Team June 13, 2014 engineering, tutorial No comments

Screen sharing is a really convenient feature, for business purposes, for technical support, etc.

Since version 27, Google Chrome offers a screen sharing functionality. That feature was activated with a flag [“Enable screen capture support in getUserMedia()” ].

However Google has recently decided to change the way screen sharing is implemented in Chrome.

From now on, screen sharing requires a Chrome Extension. Yes… each web site editor has to submit its own extension on the Chrome WebStore.

Now the good news: with this new implementation, you can share your entire screen or just a specific window.

As an exemple, this is how the dialog box looks like on Bistri.com when you share a screen:

Neither Firefox nor Opera has support for screen sharing yet. However, you can view a screen or a window shared from Google Chrome on both Firefox and Opera.

Tutorial

Create your own Chrome Extension, customizing the code of our Screen Sharing Extension on Git. Clone this extension and open the manifest.json: – line 2: modify the name attribute – line 15-20: set all domains allowed use this extension
Submit your Chrome Extension on the Chrome Developer Dashboard
Select the “Inline Installation” checkbox to allow inline install for your extension (documentation)
Copy the ItemID of your extension:

Add your Chrome Extension id to the init object

BistriConference.init( {
    appId: "125...445",
    appKey: "edhh64...99v35",
    chromeExtentionId: "paoa...oan",
    userName: "John Doe"
} );

Start local stream

BistriConference.startStream( "screen-sharing", function( stream ){
    // display stream into the page
    BistriConference.attachStream( stream, document.body );
} );

You can test the Bistri extension on the Bistri demo conference:
http://bistri.com/demo/conf