WebRTC

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a collection of 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.

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 to transfer audio and video.

WebRTC is supported in the following browsers.

As of September 2015^[update], Internet Explorer and Safari still lack the native support of WebRTC but ORTC was already added to the new Microsoft browser, Edge. Several plugins are available to add the support of WebRTC to these browsers. As of April 2016, WebKit, the back-end engine for Apple’s Safari has listed support for WebRTC as being in-development.

Firefox 34.0 was released on December 1, 2014. It brings Firefox Hello, a WebRTC frontend for voice and video chat. Hello was discontinued in Firefox 49.

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

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

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