title: Cross-Browser WebRTC Video Viewer Only
body: <p>I have been doing a lot of research into WebRTC for a project I am currently working on. I am aware that it is only supported in Chrome, Firefox, and now Opera. However, I am wondering if their is a cross-browser viewer solution that does not require a plugin. This way I could require that broadcasts be done from a webRTC compliant browser but viewers could use other browsers such as Safari or IE with watching/viewing capabilities only.</p>
  
  <p>The application I am working on is used for small group broadcasts of 25 or less people with a single publisher/presenter. </p>
  
  <p>Here is a list of the options/ideas so far. </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>Somehow have a html5 canvas element display the frames of the video on non-webRTC supported browsers. However, I also need to support audio as well and I don't believe there is anyway as of right now to feed the audio stream into the HTML5 audio element. This option may be dead before it is even considered...</p></li>
  <li><p>Have a server subscribe to the webrtc stream and then create a HLS (HTTP Live Stream) stream that can then be consumed by a browser player (Possibly Flowplayer, it supports cross-browser HLS to the best of my knowledge). I have found that Web Call Server 4 from the guys at Flashphoner can do the conversion to HLS but it seems like overkill for a simple server that does the WebRTC to HLS conversion. Hoping that there may be some sort of node.js implementation out there to generate the playlist and files for HLS so there is low latency. </p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Any help from the community on this would be much appreciated. The question is pretty specific and I have been researching solutions for the last 2 months so I think it warrants a stack overflow post at this point. </p>
  
  <p>-- UPDATE</p>
  
  <p>There may be a 3rd option here, having users on non-webrtc supported browsers install a plugin. This would only be for Safari and IE but it may be a solution. One free plugin that can be distributed for an app based on my findings are [link]<a href="https://github.com/sarandogou/webrtc-everywhere" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sarandogou/webrtc-everywhere</a> It may be possible to use this plugin with something like Kuento for signalling and achieve a solution that will at least work on all desktop browsers until Safari and IE catch-up with WebRTC. </p>