Confrere

Our video calls have to work

Confrere is free for end-users, but it’s a paid service for professionals and companies with their own account. People won’t accept paying for a tool that fails them, which means bugs and connection issues aren’t just embarrassing, they’re unacceptable. Fixing them is essential to our business model.

WebRTC video calls that work in any browser

We use the WebRTC API for our video calls. It’s a fairly new web standard that allows two browsers to transmit data directly, such as real-time video and audio, without any servers in between.

As of September 2017, WebRTC is supported in all major modern browser platforms. We have battled our fair share of bugs in an attempt to make WebRTC work for as many as possible.

We’re currently one of the few companies that support WebRTC video calls not only in Chrome and Firefox, but also Edge, Safari, iPhone and Android.

Example: Our weirdest WebRTC bug so far

In early 2018, our CTO Dag-Inge Aas stumbled upon the weirdest WebRTC bug so far. He has blogged about it and spoken about it at the WebRTC Japan Meetup in Tokyo.

Here are links and resources mentioned in the talk:

RTCStats - A tool for collecting rich statistics from WebRTC sessions
RTCStats dump importer - A tool for importing and graphing the dumps from RTCStats
webrtc-internals dump importer - A tool for importing webrtc-internals dumps
iceTransportPolicy - A way to force relay only mode for WebRTC sessions, useful for debugging
coturn - The TURN server software we use
TURN usage statistics - Statistics from my time at appear.in on TURN usage statistics, showing that most WebRTC traffic is UDP
Writing good bug reports to browser vendors - A guide which is useful when you want to write bug reports to browser vendors

Sharing our knowledge

We feel lucky to be a part of a great community of people willing to share knowledge and help each other out, from the browser teams who respond and fix the bugs we report, to the individual contributors providing excellent tooling to the WebRTC community free of charge.

Example: Autoplay restrictions and WebRTC

When working on WebRTC you are aiming for a moving target. Recently Safari and Chrome announced new autoplay restrictions that had huge implications for WebRTC services. We shared our knowledge on the matter, which is now being used as reference for how to deal with autoplay restrictions and WebRTC.

Here are some more links and resources: