[illumin8]

Exactly, it's just a tough problem to solve. As you so eloquently stated, the server-based solutions all introduce a terrible amount of latency (500ms-1 sec+ round trip) so they're not a silver bullet either.

The impressive things about WebRTC like appear.in are: - Video/audio quality is extremely good - better than almost any other server-based video chat. - Latency is extremely low because of it's direct peer-to-peer communication method. It's awesome having video chat that is <20ms round trip latency (assuming you're all in the same geographic/metropolitan area). - HTTPS/TLS/SSL gives you end-to-end encryption, which is very nice to have.

At the cost of very high bandwidth due to the mesh topology.