Programming WebRTC

Sending Images over the Chat

Let’s return to the chat feature now one last iteration: enabling users to send and receive images.

Text messages will continue to be sent over the symmetric, negotiated chat channel. But in a return to the short-lived data channels you wrote for the video-filter feature in ​Applying Filters Remotely with Data Channels​, each image a user sends will be delivered over its own asymmetric, short-lived data channel.

Your use of multiple data channels will be invisible to users: images will be appended to the chat log just like text messages are already. But by using one data channel per image, we will avoid congestion on the primary text-chat data channel. It would become a lot less performant for sending text messages ...