VOD corresponds to video on demand, as in playing video on YouTube or any other streaming service. WebRTC is real time low latency video. What is common between these two you may ask? Welcome.

We all know how to embed a usual player for video (VOD – video on demand) to the page. Typically, this is an HLS player that loads the content piece by piece via HTTP and plays those fragments using the native HLS engine. The native HLS player is peculiar for mobile browsers in iOS and Android platforms. On desktop browsers, HLS players work via Media Source Extensions or using Flash Player.

Media Source Extensions (MSE) is a browser API that allows playing audio and video using the corresponding HTML5 tags: audio and video

In order to play a chunk of audio or video, we need to feed this chunk the corresponding element using MSE API. It is MSE that HLS players are based on. HLS fragments are passed to MSE and played by the player.

Amazon S3 is a cloud file storage that many popular online services like Dropbox and Trello use. Even though there was a downtime in February 28, 2017 resulting in massive outages of online services even including fridges somewhere, S3 is, arguably, the most popular cloud-based storage today and millions of users, both individuals and businesses store their images, video, backups and other content there.

Web Call Server is a media server that supports the WebRTC technology and can record video streams from browsers and mobile devices. And HTML page in the browser or a mobile app can capture a video stream from the web camera and send it to the server for rebroadcasting and recording.

In this article we describe how you can record a video stream on a page opened in Google Chrome followed by sending the resulting mp4 file to the Amazon S3 storage.

Let’s say we have 10 users who stream video from web cameras via WebRTC. We need to display thumbnails of their streams on one page.

In this article we demonstrate 7 technologically different ways to display a video stream from an IP camera with RTSP support on a web page in a browser.

As a rule, browsers do not support RTSP, so the video stream is converted for a browser using an intermediate server.

It’s been a while since HTTP-based video content delivery protocols such as HLS and DASH edged out Flash as a primary way to play online video content in browsers.

Nevertheless, the RTMP protocol initially intended for Flash is still one of the most popular ways to transfer Live video from the source of the video to the rebroadcasting server. RTMP is still used by such services as Facebook Live, Youtube Live, and others where live video broadcasting is a must. Therefore, in spite of predictions and prophecies of untimely death of Flash, the RTMP protocol is still in the catbird seat and holds the fort in the video broadcasting niche.

Flashphoner.createSession(...).createCall({callee:'+74957718000'}).call();

In this article we will explain how to create a button to make a call to any mobile or stationary phone number directly from a web page.

Evil empires are often a target of grudge and hate from end users. This is understandable and sometimes even justified, but nevertheless Uber still partially pays for our trips (even though it’s temporarily) and Google accelerated the WebRTC technology, which otherwise would stay a proprietary and expensive software tool for quite a narrow b2b purposes if not for the Evil Empire of Google.

Since WebRTC has been made public, video chats became much easier to develop. A number of API and services, servers and framework has emerged for that. In this article we thoroughly describe one more way to develop a video chat between a web browser and a native Android application.

In this article we will try to summarize everything we know about latency of online broadcasts from the web camera of a browser: what causes the latency, how to avoid it, and how to make an online broadcasting truly real time.

Then, we will show what happens to latency through the example of a WebRTC implementation, and how using WebRTC allows keeping latency comfortably low.