WebRTC

WebRTC logo

WebRTC ("Web Real-Time Communication") is a collection of communications protocols and application programming interfaces that enable real-time communication over peer-to-peer connections. This allows web browsers to not only request resources from backend servers, but also real-time information from browsers of other users.

This enables applications such as video conferencing, file transfer, chat, or desktop sharing without the need of either internal or external plugins.[1]

WebRTC is being standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The reference implementation is released as free software under the terms of a BSD license. OpenWebRTC provides another free implementation based on the multimedia framework GStreamer.

WebRTC uses Real-time Transport Protocol to transfer audio and video.

Support

WebRTC is supported in the following browsers.


As of September 2015, Internet Explorer still lacks the native support of WebRTC but ORTC was already added to the new Microsoft browser, Edge.[7][8] Several plugins are available to add the support of WebRTC to these browsers.[9][10] At WWDC 2017, Apple announced Safari would get WebRTC support in Safari 11 [4], and it became available in release 32 of the Safari Technology Preview. [11]

Video-streaming software support

There are some server-side video-streaming programs that support WebRTC functionality: Flussonic Media Server[12] and Wowza Streaming Engine.[13]

History

In May 2011, Google released an open source project for browser-based real-time communication known as WebRTC.[14] This has been followed by ongoing work to standardise the relevant protocols in the IETF[15] and browser APIs in the W3C.[16]

The W3C draft of WebRTC[17] is a work in progress with advanced implementations in the Chrome and Firefox browsers. The API is based on preliminary work done in the WHATWG.[18] It was referred to as the ConnectionPeer API, and a pre-standards concept implementation was created at Ericsson Labs.[19] The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group expects this specification to evolve significantly based on:

Design

Major components of WebRTC include:

The WebRTC API also includes a statistics function:

RFC 7874 requires implementations to provide PCMA/PCMU (RFC 3551), Telephone Event as DTMF (RFC 4733), and Opus (RFC 6716) audio codecs as minimum capabilities. The PeerConnection, data channel and media capture browser APIs are detailed in the W3C.

W3C is developing ORTC (Object Real-time Communications) for WebRTC.[26] This is commonly referred to as WebRTC 1.1.

Concerns

In January 2015, TorrentFreak reported that browsers supporting WebRTC suffer from a serious security flaw that compromises the security of VPN tunnels, by allowing the true IP address of the user to be read.[27] The IP address read requests are not visible in the browser's developer console, and they are not blocked by most ad blocking/privacy/security add-ons, enabling online tracking by advertisers and other entities despite precautions[28] (however the uBlock Origin add-on can fix this problem).[29]

See also

References

  1. ↑ How WebRTC Is Revolutionizing Telephony. Blogs.trilogy-lte.com (2014-02-21). Retrieved on 2014-04-11.
  2. ↑ Microsoft Edge Dev. Windows.com (2015-09-18). Retrieved on 2015-09-19.
  3. ↑ Firefox Notes - Desktop. Mozilla.org (2013-06-25). Retrieved on 2014-04-11.
  4. 1 2 "Safari 11.0". Apple Inc. Retrieved 6 June 2017.
  5. ↑ Opera News. blogs.opera.com (2013-11-19). Retrieved on 2015-09-17.
  6. ↑ Firefox Notes - Desktop. Mozilla.org (2013-09-17). Retrieved on 2014-08-04.
  7. ↑ "Internet Explorer Web Platform Status and Roadmap". Microsoft. Retrieved 7 September 2014.
  8. ↑ "ORTC API is now available in Microsoft Edge". Microsoft. Retrieved 11 October 2015.
  9. ↑ "Priologic Releases First Open Source WebRTC Plugin for Internet Explorer". 2014-06-10. Archived from the original on 2014-06-26.
  10. ↑ Wilcox, Charles (2014-05-12). "Temasys Plugin Supports webRTC in Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, on Desktops" (Press release). Temasys Communications Pte Ltd. PRWeb.
  11. ↑ "Safari Technology Preview Release Notes". Retrieved 12 June 2017.
  12. ↑ Flussonic Media Server - changelog note about WebRTC support
  13. ↑ Wowza Streaming Engine - blog post related this feature implementation
  14. ↑ Harald Alvestrand (2011-05-31). "Google release of WebRTC source code". public-webrtc@w3.org. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  15. ↑ Charter of the Real-Time Communication in WEB-browsers (rtcweb) working group
  16. ↑ "WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers". W3.org. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  17. ↑ "WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers". Dev.w3.org. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  18. ↑ "Introduction — HTML Standard". Whatwg.org. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  19. ↑ "Beyond HTML5: Peer-to-Peer Conversational Video". Labs.ericsson.com. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  20. ↑ "Rtcweb Status Pages". Tools.ietf.org. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  21. ↑ "draft-jesup-rtcweb-data-protocol-00 - WebRTC Data Channel Protocol". Tools.ietf.org. Retrieved 2012-09-12.
  22. ↑ "Media Capture and Streams: getUserMedia". W3C. 2013-09-03. Retrieved 2014-01-15.
  23. ↑ "WebRTC: RTCPeerConnection Interface". W3C. 2013-09-10. Retrieved 2014-01-15.
  24. ↑ "WebRTC: RTCDataChannel". W3C. 2013-09-10. Retrieved 2014-01-15.
  25. ↑ "Identifiers for WebRTC's Statistics API". W3C. 2014-09-29.
  26. ↑ "W3C ORTC (Object Real-time Communications) Community Group".
  27. ↑ Huge Security Flaw Leaks VPN Users’ Real IP-addresses TorrentFreak.com (2015-01-30). Retrieved on 2015-02-21.
  28. ↑ STUN IP Address requests for WebRTC Retrieved on 2015-02-21.
  29. ↑ Raymond Hill (26 Mar 2016). "Prevent WebRTC from leaking local IP address". uBlock Origin documentation. Retrieved 1 Sep 2016.

Further reading

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