I set up a pretty sick VDO.ninja scene, and then started getting nervous about relying on a hosted web service that could theoretically disappear at any time. And then I remembered it’s open source—but it’s even better than I realized!
Because VDO.ninja is designed around client-side peer-to-peer connections, you can just host it from a static web server! 🤯 That means fork, enable GitHub Pages or your equivalent code forge feature, and you have yourself a full instance.
@cassidy Parts of it are open source, but this doesn't look particularly open source:
https://github.com/steveseguin/vdo.ninja/blob/develop/webrtc.js
It hard codes references to a number of websocket servers, which are needed to orchestrate the p2p connections between browser sessions.
They have some instructions for hosting your own versions of those, but it's going to be a bit more involved than static page hosting.
@jamesh yeah that’s fair and I saw that as well. My understanding is that the peer-to-peer bits would work regardless of whether the hosted version was online, but I could have misunderstood. Regardless, the fact that the source is available and you can deploy the majority of the app statically is still a huge win for resiliency and makes me a bit less nervous to rely on it.
@cassidy Without the handshake server, there's no way for the different browser sessions to know about each other. And that's a prerequisite for initiating the p2p connections.
If you're relying on the main site's handshake server, then your self-hosted version is not meaningfully different from the main site from a resilience or privacy perspective. Luckily he has documented how to run your own here: https://github.com/steveseguin/websocket_server
Said scene. It’s SO GOOD. Coming to a live stream near you soon.
Huge props to @homeassistant for the inspiration for the layout… I realized about halfway through setting things up that they must use VDO.ninja for their streams, too. 😅
@cassidy The git repo was a little buried but found it here: https://github.com/steveseguin/vdo.ninja
@cassidy Saw this used at a conference here in Vancouver recently, love love it
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