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Sean-Der
Show HN: Pion/handoff – Move WebRTC out of browser and into Go github.com

Sean-Derop6 hours ago

I wrote this to make Reverse Engineering WebRTC services easier. Will also let you save/send arbitrary media from WebRTC sessions. The idea is you do all your auth/interaction in the browser, but then do all WebRTC in Go. So you have lots more control. More to do with it, but it is far enough along to share at least.

In the README is an screenshot of sending my webcam, but replacing outgoing video with a ffmpeg testsrc. Handoff sits between so it can replace with any arbitrary video.

czbond5 hours ago

Interesting and novel project. I don't have anything constructive to add, but well done.

Sean-Derop4 hours ago

Thanks :)

No better feeling to work on something and hear it is novel! So many projects that I think will be useful miss the mark.

Hakkin5 hours ago

Oh, this is interesting. I have been messing around with a WebExtension for dumping encoded WebRTC media streams by intercepting streams on RTCPeerConnection.addTrack, but it doesn't work reliably since the current WebRTC encoded stream API(s) only supports a single reader, so if the actual website is also using the API, it either breaks the site or it's impossible to intercept the media. This seems like a nice workaround, I had briefly considered some kind of proxy but I wrote it off since WebRTC traffic is encrypted, I never considered proxying the peer connection API calls themselves. Pretty clever.

Sean-Derop4 hours ago

I can’t wait for https://w3c.github.io/webrtc-rtptransport/ when you talk about pulling vide out seems like the perfect fit.

I ended up doing proxy because Google Meet doesn’t let me hook at any RTCPeerConnection APIs at all. I wanted to send synthetic media in, but couldn’t get it working. Ending up doing a virtual webcam on Linux.

hparadiz4 hours ago

Would be interesting for a Wayland DM to catch this and draw to a picture in picture overlay

Sean-Derop4 hours ago

Oh yes! I will pull together a demo.

With ‘media-send’ I can send it out to ffmpeg/GStreamer and that does all the heavy lifting

hparadiz4 hours ago

I made a demo recently with my Google home camera using the official API https://github.com/hparadiz/camera-notif

But your way of grabbing the stream is so much simpler.

Overlay layer is super new in KDE Plasma is the only problem. You can also do v4l2loopback and make it a virtual camera.

Sean-Derop4 hours ago

Have you tried doing video + pipewire yet?

I am also using v4l2loopback, but its annoying to juggle /dev/video* devices. I wanted to do video stuff in docker containers, and it would be amazing if I could do pipewire in each container and have no global state.

I couldn't get anything to work in Chromium. FireFox saw the device, but video didn't come across.

esafak4 hours ago

Is this a good way to improve performance (frame rate, latency, CPU load) ?

Sean-Derop3 hours ago

Yea!

* Do video playback out of the browser. You can render a subset of frames, use a different pipeline for decode etc...

* Pull video from a different source. Join Google Meet on current computer, but stream from another host.

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