I recently read an announcement from a WebRTC company, celebrating the addition of data channel broadcasting to their solution as an industry first. This made me smile, as Janus has supported data channels almost since day one, which were followed shortly thereafter by integration in most of the plugins for heterogeneous use cases. Anyway, this also made me realize that we probably didn’t do a good enough job at making people aware of this functionality, which is what I’ll try to do in this post. I’ll also try to briefly introduce data channels in the first place, so please indulge me…

Capturing WebRTC traffic looks relatively easy, and most of the times it really is: you just need to launch tools like tcpdump or Wireshark on the machine of one of the peers (or on any machine that is in the media path), and then have a look at the file that has been generated, which most of the times will be a .pcap or .pcapng file. This kind of activity is especially useful when trying to debug connectivity issues or other WebRTC-related problems: in fact, applications like Wireshark automatically recognize standard protocols like STUN and DTLS, that is the procotols WebRTC PeerConnections are founded upon,…

We all read the news recently about YouTube opening the doors to WebRTC as a way to start a live stream. The webrtcHacks guys, and the amazing Philipp Hancke in particular, immediately did their usual great job in studying how that works. Among other things, they found out that, as too often happens (and without any valid reason at all, really), this only works if you’re using Chrome. Firefox? No luck. Edge? Get out of here! Safari? Well, I don’t care much about Safari, to be honest… 🙂 Anyway, this got me thinking. What about playing with this myself, to…