Trying alternatives to zoom for video RTC

maddalihanumateja commented 3 years ago

I've noticed a couple of troubling things about the current state of the running zoom on a web browser.

In order to allow access to video and microphone to a zoom web app on your browser you would need to use https instead of http. But somehow, this works only on my android mobile and not on my laptop. The zoom webapp doesn't even display on my laptops (Google Chrome on Mac and Windows) with https. Http on the other hand allows audio and video and laptop but blocks audio and video on mobile devices. I've tried testing by running the app from a server on my local network as well as a remote server. I've used the app on my laptops (Mac and Windows) and Android mobile and I get device specific issues with the webapp.
On a related note, Zoom has an explicit message on its developer documentation saying that the Web SDK (the one we use for our webapp) will not support mobile browsers. I don't know how recent this notification is but I don't think they stated this visibly before. It might have something to do with the number of changes they've made in the past semester alone. They've also been trying to promote a paid "Web Video SDK" option for some time now.

Moving forward, we might want to either think of alternatives for zoom (like we were thinking of before anyway). We might be letting go of some of the advantages of working with a video chat solution that is maintained regularly and has some performance guarantees.

maddalihanumateja commented 3 years ago

One potential solution is to just build a very simple video chat app directly using WebRTC

maddalihanumateja commented 3 years ago

Resolved through implementation of webrtc version of the app in #66

maddalihanumateja / ParticipateInRemoteDesign

Trying alternatives to zoom for video RTC #63