Videochat Extension
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Crazy Week Day 2 Report
🕑 Added 2025-02-12 00:01:25 +0000 UTCDecided to dive into the main feature: WebRTC monitoring.
How it works now?
Right now, the monitoring part is essentially a minimal viable product (MVP). It does the basics—just enough to be useful for legacy users—but there's plenty of room for growth and improvement.
The current version only shows potential candidates for establishing the peer-to-peer video connection. The legacy UI does a lot more, but the foundation remains the same:
Every IP address that your peer reveals as available for connection is geolocated and presented in a user-friendly interface. This feature is especially useful for understanding where your calls are going and for identifying individuals who attempt to conceal their real IP addresses using VPNs that do not address WebRTC leaks—resulting in their actual IPs still being exposed.
What will change?
What IP address exactly is being used for the call, is the connection good enough or even active, how much data is transmitted, and, more importantly, which IP addresses you reveal on your end—that's what is currently being worked on!
Videochat Extension's main purpose is to allow you to monitor your network activity during calls, with additional features built on top of that.
Significant progress has been made today on the monitoring side. Videochat Extension can now collect detailed connection information without disrupting applications. However, there have been no UI changes to display this new data yet.
The UI aspect is more complex, and it is challenging to ensure that both Website Mode and Browser Mode—being very different—generate similar information that the interface expects.
It is also important to show which IPs you reveal, along with a solution to fix WebRTC leaks. So the most likely next release will include improvements only to the remote aspect, while the local part not represented in the UI for now.
Changes to the monitoring code typically require a longer review process. It’s better to hold off on useless releases for now, but the work on this critical part is progressing well enough. You can expect status updates on this matter throughout the week.
