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Show HN: faces.io – ridiculously simple video chat

40 points by dhotson ↗ HN
This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat.

Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D

Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-)

Let me know what you think!

15 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread
abimaelmartell
"This is the hackiest code I've ever written. Most of it is copy pasted from elsewhere. ;-)"

I see...

dhotson
Isn't there a rule about if you're not embarassed about your 1.0 then you're not shipping fast enough? ;-)

Basically I just wanted to try out some ideas using WebRTC peer-to-peer video with some clever layout algorithms.

When I started this I was looking into libraries like Packery that are good at arranging rectangles in the smallest possible space. But I found what I really wanted was something to expand to fill all available space.

I ended up using D3's treemaps to arrange videos. Normally they're used for visualising things like diskspace, but I'm using it to fill the screen with videos.

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Treemap-Layout

k0mplex
it's chatroulette right now
lawrencegs
"Could not connect stream" ?
lawrencegs
Nevermind, its because I was using the webcam on a different window (Google Hangout).
djoehlman
Sweet layout - love it. Also while there was no hope of any client being able to decode that amount of video at one time I think it does show that the overheads of a RTCPeerConnection (without media) aren't extreme. My browser here has currently got about 60 peer connection objects open (not sure how many actually connected), but CPU and memory aren't going too crazy...
djoehlman
Oh, and if you want to get a picture of what chrome (assuming you are using chrome) is doing in the background use this url:

chrome://webrtc-internals/

dhotson
Hey cool, I didn't know about this. Thank you!
lars512
This is really cool, instant video-conferencing:

    sha1=$(head -c 1024 /dev/urandom | shasum | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
    open http://faces.io/#$sha1
send the URL to whoever you want to video-conference with.
rhgraysonii
Whats the limit on concurrent callers? We have had to stop using google hangouts for our morning standup due to more than 9 of us being on at times.