PoTeSt

Portable Television Studio

A WebRTC-based television studio you can operate with a few phones and a laptop! Seems to work ok in Safari and Chrome.

How to install:

Download or clone into a directory then cd to that directory and type:

npm install

App is SSL-only so buy a wildcard cert or generate a Let's Encrypt cert pair and place them in the directory:

Filenames are:

domain.cert.pem and private.key.pem

...or generate some fake ones yourself and add a browser exception when you get an error!

./signalmaster/generate-ssl-certs.sh

Using PoTeSt

node server.js

That starts it on port 8080

Browser

On the PC (viewer) open a browser to for instance: https://10.0.0.9:8080 or whatever your IP address or FQDN is. Be sure to use https or it won't work! Connect multiple phones to the same address and start camera sessions.
Tap once on the camera to fullscreen and lock orientation. Double click or type f to fullscreen the viewer.
On the viewer, keys 1-9 cycle through different cameras.
Stream it to the world using a streaming application such as OBS!

Advanced port handling

Want to run it on port 443 like a real SSL genius? On Mac at least, you need root to access low port numbers

sudo node server.js -p 443

Want to redirect port 80 to 443 for seamless browser experience?

sudo node server.js -p 443 -r

If you're using a Let's Encrypt certificate and you've got a DNS mapping for studio.mydomain.example that answers your LAN IP address, you can bypass the browser warning that comes with a fake certificate completely. Paired with the 443/80 options, you get a pretty seamless user experience.

Potential problems:

I was warned at https://gitter.im/andyet/SimpleWebRTC of one potential issue I ignored. Here's how the convo went down:

The Karaoke Research Council @karaokeresearch Oct 09 09:51
@StudioInteractive thank you. How do I actually stop the communication with the peer I do not wish to communicate with? I couldn't find a function on the peer object that is like "stop talking to me."

StudioInteractive @StudioInteractive Oct 12 01:22
@karaokeresearch You can't stop a comminication, because all of your peer(TVSender/TvReciever) are in the same room, and they have to talk with each other. But you can stop/remove the stream in the TVSenders for all TVSenders Peers after they connected to each other. So you can save a lot of Bandwidth . Pseudo code would be something like: simplewebrtc.on('videoAdded', function(video,peer){}) on the TVSender Side : foreach peer that have nick: TVSender . peer.pc.pc.removeStream(simplewebrtc.webrtc.localstreams[0]). after this you have to send a new offer to the peer with peer.pc.offer(config,function(err,expandedOffer){//react on error});

StudioInteractive @StudioInteractive Oct 12 01:24
Better Pseudocode: simplewebrtc.on('videoAdded', function(video,peer){ peer.pc.pc.removeStream(simplewebrtc.webrtc.localstreams[0]); peer.pc.offer(config,function(err,expandedOffer){//react on error});})

StudioInteractive @StudioInteractive Oct 12 01:31
and you have to check peer.nick = "TVSender"

The Karaoke Research Council @karaokeresearch Oct 15 19:30
@StudioInteractive holy moly it works! Thank you! Just to be clear, nothing bad will happen if I don't send a new offer, right? If I don't need to talk to them ever again, I can just removeStream and forget it?

StudioInteractive @StudioInteractive Oct 16 01:18
@karaokeresearch Its better to send the offer, because this is how you inform the other peer, that there are changes with the stream. It can cause error, when a peer is waiting for a stream but never gets one

In camera.html when another camera connects to the channel, we stop sending to it:

peer.pc.pc.removeStream(webrtc.webrtc.localStreams[0]);

but then I don't "send the offer" because I don't quite know what that means because WebRTC=hard. Will this have a negative impact? Who knows.

One solution to this would be to just use seperate channels for each cameras and use iframes on the viewer for each camera. Or maybe another framework is better suited? Who knows!!! Enjoy PoTeSt!!!