Adding WebRTC support to OBS using Rust

Minor OBS tangent: as of macOS Ventura, OBS is now an <i>extremely</i> good screen recorder for macOS with much less UI jank: previously there were a few issues such as not being able to capture application sound or not showing the mouse, but now everything works well.<p>Incidentially if this WebRTC support takes off, it may be a great tool for high-quality peer-to-peer desktop streaming.

Love to see more WebRTC! Shame to see FTL go, I contributed a few PRs to Lightspeed[1] which relied on FTL to achieve sub-second latencies.<p>On a slightly off-topic note, I’ve been working on a simple WebRTC radio project[2] for a social listening experience. In my limited testing with a few friends, I was able to get &lt; 100ms of lag (audio de-sync) between different players on different networks. It has been an absolute joy to use. The social experience of listening to music together somehow really appeals to me.<p>It was pleasantly simple to get it up and running with socket.io + Mediasoup as the SFU. I plan to flesh it out a lot more shortly but I’m a bit of a novice. Would love to have some more experienced eyes on the project :D<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GRVYDEV&#x2F;Lightspeed-ingest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;GRVYDEV&#x2F;Lightspeed-ingest</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;obviyus&#x2F;radio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;obviyus&#x2F;radio</a>

&gt; Co-authored-by: Sean DuBois<p>Sean is everywhere that involve WebRTC ! He is doing an incredible job.

I had extensive comments yesterday praising this (especially the low latency), &amp; calling out the future horizons (simulcast, multi-streaming) it might lead towards.<p>It&#x27;s still questionable to me to call this WebRTC though. My understanding is it&#x27;s only output is WHIP, WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol, which is used by CDNs to actually do the WebRTC protocol browsers do. It&#x27;s near WebRTC but a couple steps short, seemingly. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-ietf-wish-whip-05.txt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ietf.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;id&#x2F;draft-ietf-wish-whip-05.txt</a>

Surprised nobody has mentioned the excellent <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vdo.ninja&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vdo.ninja&#x2F;</a>

WebRTC is one of a very few newer browser features that has made me say &quot;That seems legitimately useful!&quot;. Good to see it being integrated with more things.

I see a description for why webrtc-rs was picked and it seems to center around the impact to build time and size. It would be helpful to know what other factors were considered.<p>&gt;Why webrtc-rs as the WebRTC library?<p>&gt; WebRTC has many libraries that we could have used. The first one we evaluated was Google’s implementation known as libwebrtc. The time required to fetch+download would have been too much of a burden for the OBS code base. These metrics come from a Macbook M1 with a 400 Mb&#x2F;s connection.

I think this only makes sense if they at least focus and get the components right that add the most value first, specifically P2P streaming. All the rest sounds like an advertisement, but I know it is open source and so I appreciate all the work.

This is very exciting. Latency can be problematic with OBS out of the box.

I know someone who did a full-fledged WebRTC plugin for OBS years ago for internal use only. Quite a shame it was never published.