A Bit of History For a while now AVChat 3 has only been compatible with Red5 0.8 and Red5 1.0 RC1. The reasons are many but the most notable is the fact that we just couldn’t get the users and rooms list to work correctly on the newer versions of Red5. It wasn’t a major issue since AVChat worked very well with 0.8 and 0.8 could be installed along newer versions of Red5. But back in August 2014 the Red5 developers introduced WebSocket support in version 1.0.3. This version peaked our interest knowing that WebSockets are a very good platform for building chat applications and adopting it would be a natural step forward for our mobile version of AVChat. But there was a problem,[…]
Author: Remus
This update is focused on making changes and solving issues based on the feedback about the last version 3.5.1, received from you, our clients. New Settings And Functionality Implemented new setting thumbnailImageShape which controls the shape of the avatars in all the areas (users list, status bar, textchat). By default it is round. Implemented new setting hideTextChat which controls whether or not the text chat area is shown. Along with this the older setting enableAudioVideoOnlyMode has been removed completely, but it’s functionality can still be obtained combining some settings together including the newly added hideTextChat. The idea behind this change was to eliminate any kind of possible conflicts that would’ve occurred if enableAudioVideoOnlyMode was activated and other settings like allowVideoStreaming was also set separately. To give you an idea on how AVChat[…]
As we were entering the second half of 2014 it was clear AVChat’s looks were up for renewal. Many clients had already referred to its looks as outdated and wanted a more modern look but we also felt a strong need to bring its design in line with today’s best practices. Thus for the latest build of AVChat we’ve made the biggest redesign since the initial release of AVChat 3.0. We’ve redesigned it with a simple philosophy in mind: everything needs to be clear, simple and consistent. We think we’ve achieved that: Hand in hand with changing the design came adopting the ability to have themes. I am proud to announce that AVChat now supports themes and, to show off the feature, it ships with[…]
Having to deal with a very busy summer, development for AVChat has been slower than usual, but we managed to allocate enough time in order to release a new build and as always we’ve integrated most of the new requests along with some compelling new features. Real-Time Text Chat Translation We have implemented a mechanism that permits AVChat to detect the language the browser is setup for. Based on this and using Google’s Translate API you can now translate on the fly messages from another language, from a user that has the browser setup in french for example, to your preferred language, assuming as well that your browser is setup in your particular language. A small translate link will appear on the[…]
Latency and especially high latency is one of the main problems when it comes to real time communication between a client and a server, so we decided to do some testing that would ultimately tell us which of the 3 main media-servers (AMS, Wowza and Red5) can achieve the lowest latency. The Testbed The testing was done using our flagship product, AVChat 3, for both client and server side as application. The client side of AVChat was installed on a local machine in Romania. The local machine has the following processing and memory specifications: Intel i5 CPU @ 3.30Ghz and 8 GB of RAM, on a Windows 7 x64 OS. For the media server I’ve used a VPS located in[…]
The latest build of AVChat is primarily focused on adding new security measures and improving the existent ones. In addition to this, a couple of other new features were added which we will cover in detail below. New and Updated Security We’ve implemented a new system on all media servers (AMS/FMS, Wowza, Red5) that only permits the connection of desktop clients which have been initialized with encrypted settings. This way the media-server will automatically detect any malicious users that attempt to connect using forged avc_settings files. This new system is controlled by the new media-server side setting allowOnlyEncryptedSettings. This setting works paired with the option enableEncryptedSettings that can be found client side in avc_settings.xml. It is recommended that if enabledEncryptedSettings is enabled to also turn[…]
Wowza Media Systems has released their new major Wowza Media Server version: Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0. This latest version adds a completely new GUI that allows the user to control and fine tune the server and individual applications without navigating the Wowza folder structure, going through .xml configuration files or restarting the media server every time you make a change. This new GUI is officially called Wowza Streaming Engine Manager, it’s browser based and can be accessed by going to this URL address http://WOWZA_SERVER_ADDRESS:8088/enginemanager/ The GUI is split in 4 areas: Homepage dashboard Server Applications Help Let’s look at each one of them in detail: 1. The Homepage The homepage gives a quick overview of the most important statistics: Number of incoming and[…]
Hello everyone and Happy New Year. We here at NuSoft are proud to release the first build of AVChat for the year 2014. The Major Features Room Music Player Every room can now have it’s own music playlist with music tracks from SoundCloud and Youtube. Upon entering the respective room the music player will automatically start to play the songs. This feature is controlled by the new setting enableMusicForRooms found in avc_settings.xml. By default this is enabled. When creating a new room if the feature is enabled you will notice a new text area in the room creation window. In this text area you can add SoundCloud and YouTube track links as seen in the image above, this way a playlist list[…]
Real-Time Communication Without Plugins WebRTC stands for Web Real-Time Communication, and it is a peer-to-peer communication technology for the browser, that enables video/audio calling and data sharing without additional plugins. WebRTC started as an effort by Google, to build a standard real-time Media Engine into all the available major browsers, and is now supported by Google, Mozilla and Opera. The API and underlying protocols are being developed jointly at the W3C and IETF. Similar attempts at implementing peer-to peer communications over the web have been made before by Adobe through their acquisition of Amicima in 2006 and subsequent Flash Player 10 (October 2008) and 10.1 (June 2010) releases. Somehow the peer-to-peer technology in Flash Player never took off. The guiding[…]
We have released an update for build 3078. This update fixes the following issues: Fixed issue with the mobile client not joining rooms on Red5. Fixed issue with the reported users shared object synchronizing every time upon a client connection, causing the Reports button to show as new reports have been added. This only happened on Red5. Fixed issue with a login text element not aligning properly if Facebook and Twitter login was disabled. Fixed issue with user items having a ‘bumpy’ appearance in the users list. Fixed issue with the ‘eye’ icon overlapping with the moderator icon in some cases. Fixed issue on the mobile client, that caused the vertical scroll in the text chat and rooms list to not[…]