Bringing WHIP to Broadcaster.VC

One of the features we've listed as coming soon over on our pricing page is NDI input - the ability to pick up a NDI feed within your local network (where the local connector is running) and bring it into your Broadcaster.VC room as a "user". This could be a return feed generated in your video production workflow or just a feed generated by an NDI input you want to be available in the room for others to see.

During our beta phase this was actually available to select people who asked for it but it wasn't very flexible and was wholly locked down to NDI input only and to be honest, was pretty "hacky" and would have needed a load of work to make it more production grade.

In comes WHIP...

WHIP is a new draft protocol going through the IETF from Sergio Garcia Murillo and the late, great, Alex Gouaillard from Cosmo and is designed to simplify ingesting WebRTC media into broadcast toolkits. Our friend Lorenzo over at Meetecho can explain WHIP far better than we can - so if you're interested in the details head over to their blog.

Suffice to say, we've been working on bringing better NDI input to Broadcaster.VC before our full launch and before we ultimately remove that "Release Candidate" tag in the header but why just limit input to NDI? Why not think bigger and allow ingesting of any endpoint that's able to talk WHIP into a Broadcaster.VC room.

Thanks to Lorenzo over at Meetecho with his Simple WHIP Client and Server code, we were able to adapt our backend to support ingesting media over WHIP and then use Lorenzo's Simple WHIP Client to send up media; we've already started work on moving our NDI input "hacky" code over to use WHIP instead.

Soon after the full launch we'll add support for creating your own WHIP endpoints within the UI allowing you to send in media from anything that can talk the WHIP protocol. If you're interested in using the Lorenzo's WHIP Client, we've just created a Pull Request to add docker support, meaning you don't need to try to compile the client itself anywhere, just run it against your WHIP ingest URL.

That's all folks, we've got some exciting news coming soon though!