We know that one of the least user-friendly parts of Roll20 right now is our built-in voice and video chat. It’s built on top of Flash (which was never really intended to do live video chat in the first place) and it’s frequently the source of much of the “Roll20 is so buggy!” talk that we’re sad to hear.
Luckily, that’s all getting ready to change, thanks to a brand-new technology called WebRTC. WebRTC allows you to have a live video/voice conversation with other folks using native code that’s built into your web browser. There’s no dependency on Flash or any other 3rd-party code. And even better, it’s peer-to-peer, so no more lag for folks who are in other countries.
WebRTC support just shipped in the new release version of Chrome (version 23) which went out to the public a few days ago. We’re already testing a new version of our built-in voice and video chat that’s built using WebRTC (it’s available as of today on our Dev server for our Mentor subscribers).
We’re incredibly excited about this new technology, and the potential it holds to make Roll20’s video and voice chat even more easy to use and seamless than before. We’ll be rolling this out to our entire user-base as WebRTC support is available in more browsers (such as Firefox) and we get things ironed out.
