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It makes sense that video chat would be complicated though. Skype came out, what, 2003? And it didn't start becoming popular until years later. FaceTime came out 2010. I would bet the vast majority of people had their very first video chat experience some time in the past decade. So of course it's hard. Nothing is built with video chat in mind, especially nothing that's existed for 30+ years like the Web. Our solutions are janky and feel bolted-on because they are. Also, I think video (especially live-streamed video) is hands-down the hardest format to work with in computing. It's simultaneously network, disk, memory, and processor intensive, and doubly so with 2+ streams at the same time. We try to fix some of this with compression, but that just makes the codecs more complex, which makes it harder to work with... Truth is though, you could "just add video chat," if you accept using a video chat vendor, of which there are probably hundreds (WebEx, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, off the top of my head). But that means offloading the complexity to someone else. In many cases that's the right call. In OP's case this was clearly meant to be a learning experience so rolling something DIY is of course acceptable. Hard to estimate, maybe, but of course it would be hard to estimate something you don't know anything about and have never done before. Would a 4th grader be good at estimating how long it would take them to learn enough abstract algebra to start publishing papers on it? |