We’re glad to present the basic support for WebRTC live video streaming in Viinex 2.0.
WebRTC technology is what allows a Web browser to receive and display a video stream in the real time, without a significant delay.
As the matter of fact, WebRTC is a number of protocols and proposed standards (to name a few — these are STUN and ICE for connection establishment, SRTP for secure media transport and DTLS for keying, SDP for session description) put together, most of which are required to be implemented and integrated with each other in order to just receive a video stream in the browser. This is all, however, pretty much transparent for those who use this technology. And we believe that for us who implement the stack of protocols, – it was worth it, because now we can provide our customers with a real-time live streaming for Web. The measured latency of a video stream from an IP camera displayed in a browser with Viinex implementation of RTC is about 230 milliseconds, — so WebRTC streaming can be used, for example, in applications where PTZ cameras need to be controlled by a surveillance operator.
Among other advantages of WebRTC is the capability of establishing a connection between a media sender and receiver directly, even when both are behind the NAT. It is possible to use Viinex WebRTC server to establish a peer-to-peer connection between an instance of Viinex, which can be behind the NAT, and a client’s browser (which is also typically behind the NAT). There’ll typically be a need in a central server, or a central cloud service, to relay the signaling HTTP requests from a client to Viinex instance, however the media data would go directly from Viinex WebRTC server to client’s browser, bypassing that central server. This allows a cost-effective video surveillance solution with a large number of users and cameras to be built.
WebRTC server is enabled in Viinex 2.0 build 244. We have also deployed this version to our demo site. Please take look at our documentation for technical info on webrtc server configuration and current implementation restrictions.