from Hacker News

Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

by bstrong on 10/11/13, 6:08 PM with 13 comments

  • by wc- on 10/11/13, 7:41 PM

    I am in the process of evaluating options for embedded video chat in a webapp, vLine looks like another potential option (tokbox or OpenTok was the other service I had looked at) so I guess it's time to make some demos. My main points of comparison so far are ease of implementation and pricing.

    The developer docs seem pretty easy to read so far, the nodejs example is nice. I'm impressed!

    Edit - after some quick testing of the vLine video app, things seem to work fine in chrome, Firefox (stable and aurora) weren't showing online users, and safari (to my surprise because as far as I know safari doesn't support webrtc) showed users and chat worked but didn't support video calls.

    Anyone know if Apple/Safari is planning to support WebRTC, or are they still sitting on the sidelines?

  • by oninojak on 10/11/13, 11:22 PM

    Seems nice but turns out to be the worst kind of service: instead of offering the marketed video chat, clicking 'go'displays a big advertisement for google chrome. I really hate those 'free' product that try to push chrome on you.

    So I tried again in firefox (because I value privacy too much to ever install google products), and now I have a box with "connecting to room..." accompanied by a sad attempt to give away my data to google analytics and that's it.

    So much for "copy. paste. video chat.", more like "relinquish your privacy to google, do that again, copy, paste, hope this will work".

    I'm sure I'm happy web browsers are getting the ability to control webcams and watch as your surf the web.

  • by dinduks on 10/11/13, 8:05 PM

    I've been looking for software to video chat without being locked in an ecosystem (especially Google Hangouts), and WebRTC seems to do the trick just fine while being completely decentralized. I just tried vLine and the quality is pretty good compared to Skype for example. Thank you vLine. :)

    By the way, is HD video not supported or is the problem from my side?

  • by evolve2k on 10/11/13, 10:51 PM

    Couldn't see from the article, does it support more than 2 computers on the video chat, aka Hangouts style?

  • by csense on 10/11/13, 8:30 PM

    Does anyone have experience with self-hosted FOSS solutions for WebRTC based plugin-free video chat?