Anyone ever developed video chat (webRTC stuff)?

[purbeast0]

i'm currently working on a mobile app for iOS (will be ported to android, so cross platform video chat is a must have too) and we're using openTok. the other day we started to look at the prices, and if our app takes off, the price we're going to be paying is pretty expensive. so we've started to look at alternatives.

the general video chat is always only going to have 2 people in it. there are 3 things that are 100% necessary for us, and we already have all of this working 100% in openTok.

1. must be cross platform (which all of the services have now)
2. must be able to get the publishers video stream and process it before it's sent over (we're using this for face detection via a custom renderer)
3. must be able to send "signals" across the connection between the 2 users (ie, one user presses something on their screen the other user immediately receives a signal so their client can be updated)

i've started looking at twilio and bit6 a bit, but i haven't found out yet if i can write a custom renderer with those yet or if they even have any concept of signals.

i'm wondering if anyone here has done anything like this before and if so, if they can recommend another service that can do all 3 of the mentioned stuff above.

obviously there is the solution to write our own webRTC video chat however, we are willing to pay for a service where we don't have to reinvent the wheel. down the road if it takes off we plan on writing our own webRTC stuff though, but for the time being we're looking at possible alternatives.

 

[cytg111]

V4L2, SDL, ffmpeg and c++, good to go .
I hear what you are saying, I dont know of any such clients, however with the custom requirements you have (and will have down the road?) is it totally bonkers to consider writing your own?
There's good sample code outthere for most of your needs, including the face detection algos.
I did some v4l2 sdl ffmpeg with c++ some time back, writing my own surv. stack, it is pretty straight forward.

 

[purbeast0]

well i already have it working 100% with tokbox, but the only problem is their pricing is pretty ridiculous.

i've been doing some research and i think we're gonna look at quickblox a little bit more. i was messing around with it tonight and i think it meets all the requirements i have. i almost had it doing what i needed to do on their sample app. their highest end pricing is also reasonable for our business plan.

down the road if our app takes off we are considering doing our own. one of the big hiccups that comes though is that there are so many different devices on android and that may mean a lot of protocols. and with that, that would mean we need to write an sdk that will work in both ios and android. not that it's impossible, but one of these out of the box solutions may be a better idea, especially initially.

 

[purbeast0]

and quickblox is the winner! i have their sample app fully functional with the signaling and face detection that is needed so i'll be integrating it into our app shortly.

and damn, kudos to their support. their support on github was incredible and helped me out big time. :thumbsup: