Chat Calls
Voice and video calling for Chat. A call button appears in every one-to-one chat window; press it and the other person's browser rings.
The audio and video go directly between the two browsers. They do not pass through your server, they are not recorded, and there is no per-minute charge from anybody.
What it does
- Voice calls from any private conversation.
- Video calls, if you allow them — your own camera in the corner, theirs filling the panel.
- Ring, answer, decline, with the caller told which of those happened rather than left listening.
- Busy handling — someone already on a call is not interrupted, and the caller is told why.
- No answer times out instead of ringing forever.
- Per-group permission. Off for every group until you turn it on.
- Works on a phone.
It bolts on — it does not modify Chat
This installs as its own application and attaches through the extension points Chat publishes. Install it and the call buttons appear. Remove it and they disappear, with no trace of a missing feature and nothing edited in Chat itself.
It also needs no change to your Realtime gateway. Two people in a conversation are already connected to it, so the call sets itself up over the connection they have.
Requirements
- Invision Community 5
- Chat — this is an add-on to it and does nothing on its own
- Realtime, which Chat already requires
- HTTPS. Browsers refuse microphone and camera access on an insecure page. This is not negotiable and not something an application can work around.
- A TURN server — see below
You will want a TURN server, and here is the honest reason why.
Roughly a third of real connections cannot go directly between two browsers, because of how home and office networks are configured. Those calls need a relay, and that relay is TURN.
Without one, calling will look like it works. You will test it, it will connect, and you will ship it — because the two people testing are almost always on the same network, which is the case that always works. It will then fail for a meaningful share of your members, and the reports you get will say "it just doesn't connect" with nothing to go on.
The download includes a ready-made coturn setup — a compose file and a configuration file with the three values you need to change marked. It takes about ten minutes. The AdminCP tells you plainly whether one is configured.
One to one, for now
This version does two people. Group calling needs an entirely different piece of server software routing everybody's video to everybody else, with real processing and bandwidth cost on your machine. That is planned as a later version rather than promised here — a call quality problem you cannot fix is worse than a feature you do not have yet.
Privacy
Media is peer to peer and encrypted by the browser. Your server sees only the handful of small messages that set the call up, and stores none of them. Nothing is recorded anywhere, by design — there is no recording feature to switch off.
TURN credentials are generated for one member and expire on their own, so a browser never holds a lasting key to your relay.
What's New in Version 1.1.0
Released
Group calls. Everyone in a chat room can now be in the same call.
Until now a call was between two people. From this version, any public or private chat room has Join call and Join with video on it, and everybody who joins can see and hear everybody else. Nobody has to be rung individually and there is no host: the call simply exists while somebody is in it, and ends when the last person leaves.
What you get
- Up to eight people on voice, or four with video, in one room. Joining without video is always offered, so a full video call never locks anyone out of the conversation.
- A tile for each person, with their name and photo until their camera is on, so an audio-only participant is still visibly there rather than a black rectangle.
- Leaving is just leaving. One person hanging up does not disturb the call between the people who stayed.
- Who may start or join a room call is the group setting you already have for calling — nothing new to configure.
Before you upgrade
Update Chat at the same time. Group calling needs Chat 1.0.7, released alongside this. Chat is what carries the signalling between browsers, and joining a room's call changes which channels your browser is entitled to listen on; 1.0.7 is what lets that new entitlement reach the open connection. On Chat 1.0.6 the person joining will appear to everyone else and hear nobody — so please upgrade both, in either order, before anyone tries it.
If you have a TURN server configured, group calls use it exactly as one-to-one calls do. If you do not, the same caveat applies as before: some members' networks will not connect without one. See the setup guide.
Honest about the limits
This is a mesh: each person sends their audio and video directly to each other person. That is why there is no new server to run and nothing extra to pay for — and also why the caps above exist. Eight on voice is comfortable; a room of thirty on video is a different kind of product and would need a media server in the middle. The limits are enforced on the server, so a call cannot quietly grow past what a domestic connection can carry.
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