Video Chat & Screensharing

[torbenraab]

It would be really nice to have a video chat and screen sharing functionality build in. So you could use it with direct chats and groups. Maybe take a look at jitsi. Its open-source and also has a self hosted option.

[MikMuellerDev]

Jep absolutely agree, this feature is the only real thing that i don't like about revolt and kinda holds me back from using it full-time.

[Sventra]

Plaese keep in mind that what we (the users and friends) ideally want is screenshare with audio, screensharing is an essential feature, but without the audio coming from the app being shared, it's often useless

[watermelonsmith]

WE NEED IT!!!!

[exdnaa]

You have to keep in mind that sharing the screen costs Revolt a lot of traffic, which has to be paid for. Revolt is not a big company with a lot of budget. I think if users are willing to pay the money for it, it is workable. Otherwise I think the feature is unlikely.

[MikMuellerDev]

It is to be noted that self hosting is an option and should be easier, since i've found it pretty hard to setup a revolt instance myself.
I suggest creating a all in one docker container / docker-compose for a complete "Revolt Stack", which involves Revolt, Autumn, January and so on.

[Sventra]

Screen sharing could be done in a P2P way, maybe with a warning about IP addresses leak and/or obfuscating them in some way, but it still should be possible to have a cheap screenshare option

[torbenraab]

It could also be an option to let the providers of a self hosted instance to decide wether they accept screen sharing and videoconferencing or not. I understand that the traffic could be quite high, but if it is self hosted and you are fine with it I don't see a problem.

[mlv-]

Traffic at Hetzner and OVH is cheap/free. Storage is another matter, though, so some limits would have to be imposed anyway.

[Official-PSASD]

I purely agreed, I would be very happy when video chat and screen sharing existed in Revolt that me and my friends can watch movies, cartoons/anime and even the events.

[Mati20187]

Adding screen sharing and video calls would make transitioning to Revolt much easier for many people because they wouldn't have to sacrifice features they are used to. I really hope this will get implemented

Edit: if the public Revolt server can't handle the traffic, make it an option on self-hosted instances

[4444dogs]

I agree - video chatting with my IRL friends would be a game changer!

[UnixPhonez]

i agree althought i'm not sure if revolt has the funds to support massive amounts of video calling etc

[iGerman00]

I agree.

I suggest(ed) to look into OvenMediaEngine.
Judging by their Spaces demo it is definitely workable.

Another cool feature to one-up even Discord would be to allow for streaming from OBS or similar software - OME offers that option too. From reading up on OvenMediaEngine it seemed pretty light on resources too.

[TRUEchips]

Yep that's the only thing keeping me from using revolt 24/7

[watermelonsmith]

yeah same

[ghost]

It's super important that not only is video and screen sharing added to Revolt, but we also have the ability to control the bitrate for these streams (configurable with docker env variables).

Discord bitrate is horrendous even with Nitro and I'd love to have high quality streams when self hosting.

[yoyoinneverland]

I like what I'm reading about Revolt, but screen-sharing video games is an integral part of our server. Hopefully it's added at some point so we can migrate.

[keyboardclaire]

This is possible with P2P isn't it?

[keyboardclaire]

Oh yep. WebRTC. It's completely P2P and supports screen sharing, video, etc. It's the perfect solution.
Though Discord uses a relay server to prevent call participants from being DDoSed https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-handles-two-and-half-million-concurrent-voice-users-using-webrtc
I don't think call participants being DDoSed is a legitimate fear.

[MasicoreLord]

A relay server could still be beneficial for things like CGNat, tunnel, VPN w/ port-forwarding, and etc.

Also the potential for DDOS is very much a concern many have w/ P2P solutions like was used in early Skype.

[benjamin051000]

DDOSing is a legitimate fear in public servers. In a private server, the only person to DDOS you is someone you know, so I doubt for private servers you would need any kind of IP address hiding/masking.

[benjamin051000]

I imagine self-hosting a relay server wouldn't be too difficult. At least you get one level of indirection there.

[iGerman00]

Maybe something like a toggle could be made for servers that can choose to use or not use a relay servers, and also warn users if their IP could be exposed before joining a call or starting a screen share session, or prohibit public servers from not using a relay altogether.

[candroid-man]

This is the only thing I need to switch my entire server to Revolt. I am done with Discord's bullshit, but there is not yet a suitable alternative

[Kanan99X]

Agreed, would love this feature. Make it peer-to-peer.

[pollux78]

also would like this when revolt is earning enough revenue + please implement it for linux with pipewire and wayland support as these are standards in linux now not pulseaudio or x11

[mikilian]

I agree about pipewire but disagree about x11.

[pollux78]

I agree about pipewire but disagree about x11.

We are moving to wayland, its already ready under amd and intel, nvidia will be ready in late may to june.

Using pipewire and xdg-desktop-portals is the way

[mikilian]

Honestly I can't follow you. What has Intel, AMD or nvidia to do with revolt? I just wanted to say, wayland isn't the only display server + million of people out there are using X11. So screen sharing should work for both of them, not just the half.

[amycatgirl]

Just saying, XDG Desktop Portals work on both X11 and Wayland, so it will work on both display servers. Wayland support depends on the browser, in the case of the (current) desktop app, you need a flag to enable wayland support, as it runs under XWayland by default.

[amycatgirl]

Can't say anything about Tauri, though, because I don't know anything other than it using the system's webview (which defaults to WebkitGTK on linux).

[ricowalker]

This is the only feature missing, making it a hard sell marketing-wise towards the community on why to move away.
I can't blame them either, why 'step-down' feature wise?

I feel this feature's essential for the existence and growth of Revolt

[clockwinder]

This is all I'm waiting for to migrate (and start donating) to Revolt.

[dougann]

bump. this is essential!! Revolt works so nicely out of the box, the cleanest discord alternative out there, I almost couldn't believe it, but then it came to videocalling and screensharing and that's where I lost my friends when trying to convince them to move to revolt ;(

[DoubleCatling]

Time to wake up boys! People of the Motherland need you!

[Hetkinsonn]

We need screensharing, boss!

[CemKutlar]

Currently, Discord is banned in Turkey and Russia. Now is the best time to implement screen sharing and video calls and promote your app in those countries. Personally, I couldn't convince my friends to go with Revolt because of the lack of those features.

[glushkowww]

If these features don't appear as soon as possible, then Guilded will take away all these newcomers.

[frkntlr]

@glushkowww You need roblox to log in to Guilded. Roblox is also banned in Turkey.

[glushkowww]

@glushkowww You need roblox to log in to Guilded. Roblox is also banned in Turkey.

Wow, thanks for the clarification, I didn't know! But I was talking mainly about Russia, there are 150 million people there and Roblox has not been banned yet. But this is no longer so important, because Guilded can no longer be accessed from Russia.

[frkntlr]

@glushkowww The lack of discord and guilded is really annoying. the lack of screen sharing in revolt is annoying. It would be nice if we could at least share screens in revolt as self host.

[glushkowww]

@glushkowww The lack of discord and guilded is really annoying. the lack of screen sharing in revolt is annoying. It would be nice if we could at least share screens in revolt as self host.

Yeah, I understand you so much. And the most annoying thing is that the quality of the screensharing in Guilded was much better than in the Discord without Nitro. I hope the Revolt will also be made screensharing at least at the same level.

[NebulaBC]

This is the only thing stopping me from running revolt. I understand that this is a community funded project, but when compared to other voice only options, I'd rather run mumble. The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of people looking to get off of Discord, but there's no great alternative at all. If revolt had screen sharing, it would make it a very viable alternative. It would certainly be nice if the best alternative to Discord was self-hostable.

[Alecks20]

I completely agree if they just added screensharing even with the current ui so many people would switch

[Mahi]

How about making it a paid feature on Revolt's servers? Any user who donates to Revolt monthly (like $1 or smth) can then share their screen on any of Revolt's servers. And it would still be made free on self-hosted servers—if the host so allows.

[calebfaruki]

I will pay.

[Roboron3042]

This is an important feature for Revolt to have, specially screen-sharing (imo). It is so important that it may be worth to explore offering a crowd-sourced bounty to anyone interested in developing this for Revolt. What do you think?

[Hidend]

Like many others, whenever you have this it will be an insta change from Discord to Revolt.

[celulamp]

Still waitin

[IAmTomahawkx]

You'll have to wait a bit longer (unless you're able to help implement it!)

[aScHEABL]

I'm surprised no one mentions financial side of video/screen streaming.
It's going to cost a lot, even 720p is not cheap.
With Revolt being open-source, free and no future plans to make profits. It's not going to happen.
Who's gonna pay the bills? Donation alone won't be enough to cover this.

The only way to achieve this is with self-hosted revolt server.

[candroid-man]

I would absolutely pay money for this

[frkntlr]

I'm surprised no one mentions financial side of video/screen streaming. It's going to cost a lot, even 720p is not cheap. With Revolt being open-source, free and no future plans to make profits. It's not going to happen. Who's gonna pay the bills? Donation alone won't be enough to cover this.

The only way to achieve this is with self-hosted revolt server.

It can also be provided in a peer to peer structure. I don't think there will be much change in terms of costs this way.

[garbofrogman]

I'd love a P2P screen sharing option

[clockwinder]

Self hosting is the entire reason I'm here.

[aScHEABL]

I'm surprised no one mentions financial side of video/screen streaming. It's going to cost a lot, even 720p is not cheap. With Revolt being open-source, free and no future plans to make profits. It's not going to happen. Who's gonna pay the bills? Donation alone won't be enough to cover this.
The only way to achieve this is with self-hosted revolt server.

It can also be provided in a peer to peer structure. I don't think there will be much change in terms of costs this way.

P2P at small scale is definitely possible. But imagine if someone from another continent joins the video sharing.
That is going to be a nightmare.

As of now, you can't join any self-hosted server with the official launcher.
You'll have to compile one yourself from the ground up when you set the self-hosted server.
So literally no incentive in choosing self-hosted option at this point.

[jaxry]

P2P streaming via WebRTC sounds like a great solution to me since most internet providers that have the bandwidth to download a stream have at least the same bandwidth to upload a stream.

In order to scale streaming to multiple viewers, could you employ a "successive" P2P approach, where when a viewer watches a stream, that viewer uploads the stream data to the next person who joins the stream (as opposed to the original streamer) creating a chain so that the original streamer doesn't have their network overwhelmed?

Is that a dumb idea or could that work? I could see delay getting progressively worse as you get more viewers but are there other problems with that idea?

[aScHEABL]

P2P steaming is not possible if there are several people in the room all from different continents.
It's going to be a nightmare for all participants involved.

[frkntlr]

In traditional video transmission systems, data is usually sent through centralized servers.
However, as the physical distance between users and the server increases, latency and performance issues become more noticeable.
This is especially problematic for users located across different continents.

To solve this, we can create a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) network where users' computers at different locations act as small servers.
In this system:

Data is transmitted directly between users without fully relying on a central server.

Users connect to the peers that are geographically closest to them.

The central server is used only for initial connection setup and basic signaling.

Once connected, the data flows directly between peers.

With this approach:

Server load is reduced significantly,

Latency is minimized because of shorter transmission paths,

The network becomes more scalable, resilient, and cost-effective.

Technologies that could be used:

WebRTC: Enables direct communication between browsers, even behind NAT (Network Address Translation).

P2P Mesh Networks: Each device acts both as a data receiver and sender.

NAT Traversal / Hole Punching: Techniques to overcome connection issues behind routers and firewalls.

Advantages:

Low-latency and faster data/video transmission,

Less dependency on centralized infrastructure,

Lower server and operational costs.

Challenges:

Dealing with NAT and security complexities,

Designing for reliability against node failures,

Optimizing peer selection and network management.

I'm not very experienced in software development. I created this idea with a bit of help from AI.
Theoretically — and maybe even practically — while there are still latency issues in server-client communication over continents,
I don't think the problems would be as severe in a P2P (peer-to-peer) system.
Since data would be transmitted directly between users, it could provide faster and lower-latency communication.

[chucklemaster]

I would absolutely love to see P2P screen share and/or subscription to help pay the video bill. The instant revolt gets this feature, I'll finally be able to get all 50+ of the people in my disc*rd to move here.

[0fflineuser]

Hi, I would also love it, it wouldn't bother me to pay for it but I am also mainly interested by the selfhosting aspect.
I think that with Discord going public if this feature is implemented it could add a lot of new users to revolt.

[xMello24x]

Screen sharing is a must for this app

[Drunk-Root]

it could be integrated with another app that already has screen share like Jitsi meet or p2p as said in some above responses