peer 2 peer libraries to broadcast real time video using websocket?

Question

First of all, is it a nice and successfull idea to use peer 2 peer to broadcast realtime video ? I know that it will make the application scallable and will allow more users to get the real time video without affecting the server much, but are there drawbacks performance-wise and video quality-wise ?

Now the specefic question, my intention is to share realtime video, and then use peer2peer in the webclient level using websockets, are there any libraries that are used for this purpose?

I know that streaming should be better using UDP but the follwing post says that even using websockets (TCP) at 30fps is fast ennough (Video streaming over websockets using JavaScript)

Answer 1

XSockets.NET provides a WebRTC API. This will provide you a JavaScript API for P2P communication. You can actually have a video chat with 2 or more participants really easy.

If you are a .NET dev you can install the sample from nuget. That sample contains a example of a multivideo chat.

The video will be of high quality, but you can set parameters to get lower resolution if you have low bandwith.

WebRTC works in Chrome and Firefox today (as well as chrome 29 on android). You can try this site with Chrome (not updated for Firefox or mobile) http://browsermeeting.com/

Nuget Package

Answer 2

You can check out IceLink (disclaimer: I work @ FM), it'll help you do this.

I've actually built something along these lines for a client of ours, where each successive client becomes a potential "distribution" node. So X clients connect to the main server, and from there, other clients can connect to those clients (provided they have appropriate bandwidth/CPU/etc) for a re-broadcast version. It's sort of a supernode/mesh concept, and it works reasonably well.