Hey everyone, welcome to our new blog!
Happy new year! 2022 was a tremendous year for the project with lots of milestones being met. Here we’d like to highlight a few of them as well as go over some of the future updates we’re aiming to make this year.
First things first, as of today we are fully deprecating VRCDN relays. Relays were very useful for connecting DJs to VJs, and for multi-camera streams, and we know many people are worried that they will need to rethink their workflows. Do not worry, Private streams can be used at the same time as your regular Live stream and should be used in replacement of your Relay stream. The reason we are deprecating Relay streams is that they relied on long-distance RTMP connections which is something the protocol struggles with. Private keys propagate through the network meaning this is no longer an issue. This will also allow for other ingest and egress protocols to be used, more on that later in this blog post.
Speaking of this blog post, hey we have a blog now! We have re-worked our website to make it easier to access our links and information. This also means that the old VRCDN Control Panel is now on separate subdomain for easier access, the new link is: https://panel.vrcdn.live
VRChat Groups has been released in an early stage and we feel they will be much more accessible and user friendly than our bots can be, which is why we have decided to cease all future development of our VRChat Bots with the plan to deprecate them once VRChat Groups has been fully released. We will continue to fix any breaking bugs and will accept any booking requests, but will not be adding any new features.
2022 saw VRCDN reach over 1000 Patreon subscribers and we cannot thank each and every one of you enough! Your support has allowed us to continue growing and developing the project into something we never thought possible when we started this. Thanks to this, we have been able to expand into new regions including US West, South America, and further into Asia! We’re slowly reaching the possibility of having VRCDN servers in every corner of the globe.
To continue growing, we had to make some changes to how VRCDN operates. VRCDN has become a registered company here in the UK, and from now will continue to trade under VRCDN LTD. The next time you log into VRCDN you will be asked to read and agree to our new terms of service and privacy policy. These policies not only protect us, but also clearly explain our rules and how we handle your personal data. Please login and read through these as soon as possible.
We are adding two new protocols to the VRCDN media server that we hope to roll out soon. The first of these is SRT support for both ingesting and egressing streams. SRT is a lot more resistant to Internet latency and weirdness than RTMP is. We hope this will help users with more unstable connections stream to us without issues as popular streaming software, such as OBS, already support SRT. We will continue to accept and support RTMP streaming when SRT is released onto our network but in certain situations we may recommend SRT.
WebRTC is the second protocol we’re adding to our media server. WebRTC is the standard for real-time voice communication and screen sharing and we feel it could be very useful for some workflows. It will allow users to stream directly from their browser, making the barrier of entry even lower than before! It will also allow for lower latency web previewing to help with web-based applications for monitoring and switching between multiple camera streams, for example. We have no ETA for when we will be releasing these new protocols, but we hope to bring them to the network soon. We have in-development opensource projects for an OBS plugin and Unity plugin to allow WebRTC streaming.
The final piece of news is one that will help us grow to new regions this year. VRCDN has been accepted into Linode’s RISE program! This program is to help startup companies scale easier within their many Datacenters. Linode was recently acquired by Akamai, who are very well known for their global backbone and CDN, this means better global connectivity to VRCDN as well as many new locations for us to expand into.
Random fact from New Year's: we hit over 100gb/s total egress, which is the highest we have ever hit!
That’s all we have for now, happy new year from the VRCDN team.