Subject: [rtcweb] some thoughts on an alternative WebRTC approach: iWebPP - instant web p2p technology

From: tom <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:40:44 +0800

Hi,

  WebRTC intends to setup P2P communication between browsers, then carry
video/audio/text media, etc.

  For example, in the conference call, WebRTC takes four tasks:
1. pick up local medias: video, voice, etc
2. encoding local medias
3. streaming medias via p2p channel securely
4. decoding medias

for item 1, it need to export OS level media interfaces to browser via JS.
for item 3, it should implement Streaming Server in browser with html5
techs: web workers, etc
for item 2 and 4, it should implement a lot of algorithms on video and
audio. the most of them is redundant works against gstreamer/ffmpeg.

AFAIK there are two reference implementations to WebRTC: Google's and
Ericsson Lab's. Google is doing all stuff, while Ericsson reuses gstreamer.
Item1 above has no many stories. But, item2,4 and item3 may have another
stories.

Why we need WebRTC? Firstly, Web is the most popular network app, secondly,
video/voice brings the best user experience.
But, the problem is that HTTP runs upon TCP by now, while P2P runs upon UDP
normally.

Suppose both web browser and server can run HTTP upon UDP(the protocol
schema as HTTPP), what happen?
Firstly, Web app developers can program HTTPP like HTTP, secondly, P2P
traffic can be carried on HTTPP.

Basically iWebPP consists of two parts: HTTPP-enabled web browser and web
server.
We have implemented a Firefox extension and Node.js variant  to run HTTP
upon UDP. They are the first step and will be open source soon.

Any thoughts? thanks.

Best regards
   Tom