Additionally, I decided to add some CSS styling to arrange the video containers on the screen and labels to identify each participant. Using this example as a baseline, all I had to do is extend it to support an arbitrary number of participants. After some searching, I found a great example of a basic implementation of 1-to-1 video using WebRTC and a simple Node.js server to relay messages over Websockets. Most of the available tutorials on WebRTC only show a trivial implementation of two client objects in the same browser window. WebRTC is an asynchronous peer-to-peer architecture, and the only need for a centralized server is for exchanging the connection set up information. But then I thought, hold on, it’s 2019, I bet there is a web-based solution out there for streaming video feeds!Īs it turns out, that solution is called WebRTC, and it is the web standard for real-time peer-to-peer communication. I first considered setting up a dedicated IP camera in each office.

I thought it would be fun to see if we could build a replacement ourselves. We were initially using an off the shelf video conferencing service, but it was cumbersome to use and needed a manual restart every few days. So, for a while now, we’ve had a video “portal” set up in the kitchen area of each office. At DMC, we like to keep in touch with colleagues across all of our offices.

Multi chat client windows