Hopefully in-person meet-ups will prove much easier in 2022 - but, there’s still a need for video calls, so let’s face it, they’re here to stay. This makes it really exciting to present Element Call: the world’s first decentralised voice and video conferencing app powered entirely
That is literally build into every browser… Call me again when they have e2ee and SFU working.
What’s SFU? E2EE has been working for a long time
Context man. e2ee for the voice/video calls obviously which they say themselves isn’t enabled. Although that is a bit strange as p2p browser webrtc is somewhat e2ee by default. Maybe they mean the initial key exchange or so?
An SFU is a server side component that forwards video streams and which is required to have video calls with many people. The 8 they mention with their SFU less mesh calls is highly optimistic, in reality it starts breaking down at 4 participants or less.
How are decentralized video calls bulit into every browser exactly?
Its called Webrtc. Look it up. It needs a signalling channel to establish the p2p connection so it can’t be simply used out of the box, but it is not especially complex to utilize either.
That’s just the base to build video calls upon. I’m a big fan of p2p as well, but p2p only limits the number of participants pretty hard. (4 people, yes. 10? Maybe. 50? Nope.)
Exactly my point… for it to be really worthwhile Matrix needs to implement a SFU, which is considerably more complicated then just using what is build into the browser anyways.
Agreed.