Mastering webRTC – make a video chat app!

TL;DR – you’ll learn WebRTC in this course – how to get a video feed and setup a video chat between browsers with just JavaScript. The first section and a few later projects are front-end only, the connection section and later projects require Node.js and Socketio.

It’s 2024. Whether because of the pandemic, chat bots, or cost savings, working remote is a thing. Telemedicine is a thing. Talking to people 6 time zones away is a thing. You can abstract your users from your app to Zoom because it always works, but you lose all control and tracking of the interaction.

Enter webRTC.

WebRTC is one of the browsers must mind blowing apis. It allows access to the mic, camera, even the screen AND to share them across a network socket DIRECTLY to another browser. No server (mostly) or other middleman to add bandwidth, bugs, and chaos.

Along with websockets, webRTC presents the video-side of browser real-time communication, bridging one of the last gaps in both human and web-based communication. There’s a good chance if you’re reading this, you’ve heard about webRTC. Maybe even done a tutorial on it. But how far did you get? In my experience, the vast majority of the material on the web goes no farther than a quick-start, zoom clone. You don’t learn how anything works, never look at the docs, and are stuck at the end wondering what to do now. Is that all webRTC can do? The remaining shred of material is waaaaay over everyone’s head. The fact that the webRTC was released about the same time as the websocket API  and most developers still don’t know how to use it is evidence of the gap.

This course is the first step to alleviate that! It is not a quick start guide to webRTC. There are loads of those all over the Internet. You should definitely look elsewhere if you are wanting a 10 minute intro to the 3-4 things you need to know to make a basic zoom clone. On the other hand, if you are looking to really learn one of the most awesome JavaScript APIs that no one seems to know, you should stick around. Like Express and other JavaScript/Node pieces, it’s getting passed over in the wave to learn just enough to get to the term “full-stack developer.” My main goal is to help you figure out how to go from being a good developer to a great developer. Understanding… not just knowing a few methods… WebRTC is part of that!

I first used webRTC in 2015 for a startup similar to telemedicine. I’ve been following since and have been frustrated that it hasn’t gotten more mainstream notice due to Apple’s reluctant support, but mostly because devs don’t know it. It opens the way for so many improvements to existing applications and obvious groundwork for new ones. Let’s change that 🙂 Prepare to for a detailed look at webRTC and start going in-app real-time video/screen chat.

What we cover:

Front-end only portion

• getUserMedia() – getting access to the mic and camera in the browser

• playing the feed in a <video />

• MediaStream and MediaStreamTrack – what makes up a video feed

• Constraints – getSupportedConstraints() and getCapabilities() – seeing what this browser can do

• applyConstraints – changing the feed on the fly

• Recording video/audio and playing it back

• Capturing the Screen for screen share and recording it

• Changing input/output devices in your feed

Back-End required (node, socketio)

• RTCPeerConnection – the heart of webRTC

• Creating an offer and an answer

• Setting RTCSessionDescription

• The Signaling Process

• Build a signaling server with socketio

• Gathering ICE Candidates

• Building a React app w/redux that uses webRTC