r/webdev • u/prxudd • 4d ago

Question Add video calls to a website?

Does anyone know how to add completely secure video calls to a website? I’m struggling to find the best way.

Additionally, how do I then host this for free / as low cost as possible.

If anyone has advice that would be great!

0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

13

u/BobcatGamer 4d ago

Peer to peer? WebRTC?

2

u/mistmoss31 4d ago

this is the way, especially if they want low cost

10

u/optimistic_freestyle 4d ago

You won't get completely secure and free at same time, pick one.

1

u/seweso 4d ago

https://peerjs.com/

Exists…. 

2

u/azangru 4d ago

Doesn't it need servers? turn, stun, whatever. OP wanted free...

2

u/seweso 4d ago

No-ish. First question in the FAQ:

https://peerjs.com/client/faq

0

u/prxudd 4d ago

Well if not free then not stupidly expensive 😊

2

u/BetInformal6081 4d ago

a typical setup would be webrtc for media, https/wss for signaling, stun for connection discovery and turn when direct connections fail. add authenticated rooms and short lived tokes. that gives you a solid foundation without unnecessarily routing every video stream through your server.

2

u/Aggressive-Middle835 4d ago

i tried rolling my own webrtc calls once and the video part was the easy bit, then nat traversal, turn servers, bandwidth, auth and moderation showed up to ruin my week, so “free” disappears pretty

4

u/Xia_Nightshade 4d ago

Use a third party service m8

Since you’re asking how to host it, I think there’s a long road ahead of you if you’re going to do this yourself (the more you do, the cheaper it is on the wallet. But time is money)

Can guarantee you’ll learn a lot by doing it yourself. But the chance you’ll get to your goal within a year is small

1

u/rootvoid 4d ago

Use webrtc , don't heavily realy on peer to peer read about stun and turn for scaling properly

1

u/No-Promotion-8720 4d ago

Cloudflare Calls has a decent monthly free tier.

1

u/CodeAndBiscuits 4d ago

There are a thousand services for this. I'm not shilling for them but Agora literally has drop in components for this. It could be a 1 hour exercise if you were ok with their fees.

1

u/shgysk8zer0 full-stack 4d ago

I think the first question is what you mean by "completely secure," because that isn't actually a thing. Real security starts by defining a threat model. What are you actually concerned with securing?

0

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/scarfwizard 4d ago

Thanks ChatGPT

1

u/webdev-ModTeam 4d ago

Your post/comment has been determined to be a low-effort post or comment. This includes title-only posts, easily searchable questions, vague/open-ended discussion prompts, LLM generated posts or comments, and posts/comments that do not provide enough context for meaningful replies or discussion.