Archived as of 4/11/21 Not actively maintained.

BitLink is an open source video conference chat program.

Features

No Download Needed

BitLink can operate completely in the browser on both mobile and desktop devices.

Robust Chat System

BitLink has a robust integrated chat system. Participants can send messages individually or to the entire room. Participants can edit and delete messages. When a new participant joins, the entire chat history will be synced with their device.

Background Replacement / Blur

BitLink has built in background replacement (virtual background) support and blur background functionality. Powered by Tensorflow's BodyPix library, we are able to achieve great accuracy while still achieving high performance. Many laptops can apply background replacement without fan spin.

Waiting Room

BitLink has a waiting room feature. Once the host enables the waiting room, new members will be entered into a waiting room where the host can either accept them into the room or reject them from entering.

Screen Sharing

Users can share their screen with other users in the room.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/oss-videochat/bitlink.git`
cd bitlink
npm install
lerna bootstrap
lerna link 
lerna run build # may hang, see note below
cd server
MEDIASOUP_LISTEN_IP=<YOUR IP ADDRESS>; npm run start

lerna run build should work, but if it doesn't, manually build with

cd common && npm run build
cd ../frontend && npm run build
cd ../server && npm run build

Usage

cd server
MEDIASOUP_LISTEN_IP=<YOUR IP ADDRESS>; npm run start

FireFox Development Issues

Firefox and Chrome both don't allow WebRTC connections to 127.0.0.1/localhost via UDP. Chrome, however, does allows connecting to 127.0.0.1/localhost via TCP. As such, Chrome should work without issue in development. Firefox on the other hand will likely error with something to the effect of "ICE failed, add a STUN server and see about:webrtc for more details".

To work around this you must use an IP address not in the range of 127.0.0.1 - 127.255.255.255 and pass it to the MEDIASOUP_LISTEN_IP environment variable.

We suggest either using your internal IP address, e.g MEDIASOUP_LISTEN_IP=192.168.1.197 or aliasing another address to your localhost. On macOS and Linux this can be accomplished by running:

sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 172.0.0.1

and then passing the chosen IP to Mediasoup, e.g. MEDIASOUP_LISTEN_IP=172.0.0.1.

Note: To reverse and remove the alias run sudo ifconfig lo0 -alias 172.0.0.1.

Regardless of the chosen method, you can still access the site at localhost/127.0.0.1.

Contributing

Thank you for helping BitLink grow! Please submit a PR request.