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• WebRTC books – a brief review

  1er janvier 2014, par silvia

  I just finished reading Rob Manson’s awesome book “Getting Started with WebRTC” and I can highly recommend it for any Web developer who is interested in WebRTC.

  Rob explains very clearly how to create your first video, audio or data peer-connection using WebRTC in current Google Chrome or Firefox (I think it also now applies to Opera, though that wasn’t the case when his book was published). He makes available example code, so you can replicate it in your own Web application easily, including the setup of a signalling server. He also points out that you need a ICE (STUN/TURN) server to punch through firewalls and gives recommendations for what software is available, but stops short of explaining how to set them up.

  Rob’s focus is very much on the features required in a typical Web application :

  • video calls
  • audio calls
  • text chats
  • file sharing

  In fact, he provides the most in-depth demo of how to set up a good file sharing interface I have come across.

  Rob then also extends his introduction to WebRTC to two key application areas : education and team communication. His recommendations are spot on and required reading for anyone developing applications in these spaces.

  —

  Before Rob’s book, I have also read Alan Johnson and Dan Burnett’s “WebRTC” book on APIs and RTCWEB protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web.

  Alan and Dan’s book was written more than a year ago and explains that state of standardisation at that time. It’s probably a little out-dated now, but it still gives you good foundations on why some decisions were made the way they are and what are contentious issues (some of which still remain). If you really want to understand what happens behind the scenes when you call certain functions in the WebRTC APIs of browsers, then this is for you.

  Alan and Dan’s book explains in more details than Rob’s book how IP addresses of communication partners are found, how firewall holepunching works, how sessions get negotiated, and how the standards process works. It’s probably less useful to a Web developer who just wants to implement video call functionality into their Web application, though if something goes wrong you may find yourself digging into the details of SDP, SRTP, DTLS, and other cryptic abbreviations of protocols that all need to work together to get a WebRTC call working.

  —

  Overall, both books are worthwhile and cover different aspects of WebRTC that you will stumble across if you are directly dealing with WebRTC code.

• New Challenges

  1er janvier 2014, par silvia

  I finished up at Google last week and am now working at NICTA, an Australian ICT research institute.

  My work with Google was exciting and I learned a lot. I like to think that Google also got a lot out of me – I coded and contributed to some YouTube caption features, I worked on Chrome captions and video controls, and above all I worked on video accessibility for HTML at the W3C.

  I was one of the key authors of the W3C Media Accessibility Requirements document that we created in the Media Accessibility Task Force of the W3C HTML WG. I then went on to help make video accessibility a reality. We created WebVTT and the <track> element and applied it to captions, subtitles, chapters (navigation), video descriptions, and metadata. To satisfy the need for synchronisation of video with other media resources such as sign language video or audio descriptions, we got the MediaController object and the @mediagroup attribute.

  I must say it was a most rewarding time. I learned a lot about being productive at Google, collaborate successfully over the distance, about how the WebKit community works, and about the new way of writing W3C standard (which is more like pseudo-code). As one consequence, I am now a co-editor of the W3C HTML spec and it seems I am also about to become the editor of the WebVTT spec.

  At NICTA my new focus of work is WebRTC. There is both a bit of research and a whole bunch of application development involved. I may even get to do some WebKit development, if we identify any issues with the current implementation. I started a week ago and am already amazed by the amount of work going on in the WebRTC space and the amazing number of open source projects playing around with it. Video conferencing is a new challenge and I look forward to it.

• cross-platform syntax for mp4 embedded in html5

  11 janvier 2015, par CodeMed

  The code below produces a properly embedded video in firefox, but does not display properly in internet explorer or in android. I have all my browsers set to automatically update, so they are all always running the most current versions.

  In `internet explorer`, the code below leaves a large blank space where the  
  
  video should be.  The user has to hover over the large blank space before the  
  
  controls become visible.  
  
  
  
  In `android`, the code below produces an unusable/unclickable area, and the  
  
  user has to greatly zoom the focus to get the small start button to become  
  
  big enough to click to start the video.  
  
  
  
  However, in `firefox`, the code below shows the first frame of the video,  
  
  which you can click to start the video.  

  How can I change the code below to get all three of these browsers to show the first frame when the page loads, and for the video to be start-able when the user clicks on the first frame ?

  Here is a link to the video file on a file sharing site.

  Here is the ffmeg code for processing the video :

  ffmpeg -y -i SourceFile.mp4 -s 1280x720 -c:v libx264 -b 3M -strict -2 -movflags faststart DestFile.mp4

  Thanks to offbeatmammal for getting me this far.
  Here is the html5 code for embedding the video in a web page browser :

  <video width="640" height="480" controls="controls">
  
      <source src="somefile.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  
      Your browser does not support the video tag.
  
  </source></video>