Packed into Yelp headquarters on Wednesday, October 9, attendees of San Francisco’s HTML5 Meetup heard our CEO and co-founder, Ben Strong, dive into the state of WebRTC for mobile and group conferencing. Now you can hear about it, too, in this video of his thirty-minute presentation.
A few teasers…
When it comes to mobile WebRTC, support was added in Chrome 29 and Firefox 24 for Android. Apple only allows browsers on iOS to use the mobile Safari engine, so Chrome for iOS does not yet support WebRTC. But there is a work around – embed your WebRTC in your application.
One big question developers face is whether to build an HTML5 WebRTC application for the browser or build it as a native mobile app. There are benefits – and tradeoffs – to either path. Taking into account the differences between devices is one of the most challenging aspects of mobile WebRTC. Most mobile devices are not as powerful as laptops (of course, there are exceptions in both directions), and spending time understanding how WebRTC adapts to various network environments is critical to creating a desirable experience.
Before moving on to group conferencing, Ben shares insights about the plethora of devices on the market today that are “not quite mobile,” but can leverage WebRTC to make it into a high end telepresence device (think fancy Cisco installation at a fraction of the price).
Support for group conferencing is an ongoing quest in the land of WebRTC. Ben dives into your options when it comes to supporting multi-party connections. Live demos illustrate the differences between a mesh (every peer connects to every other peer) versus star (all feeds are streamed through a central server) configuration. The tradeoffs are analyzed.
Ben wraps up with a handful of considerations for UI configuration.
Let us know what you think and, as always, if you have any questions, let us know @vlineinc or [email protected].