In this article we will once again return to the tired topic of webinars and webinar hosting tools. And no, we’re not about to code a whole new system for webinar hosting – there are already plenty of those. Instead, we will talk about connecting drawing software to the webinar, so that you could manually draw and broadcast the process.

At first glance, the solutions are readily available. All you seem to need is to add a canvas to the page (HTML 5 element «Canvas»), and start drawing. Well, adding it is easy enough, but the question is how to transmit the drawing process into WebRTC.

So, let us take a closer look at what WebRTC streaming from canvas (or Canvas streaming) is, and what pitfalls you might want to look out for.

What is Canvas?

Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about it.

Canvas is an HTML5 element, dedicated to creating raster-based 2D images using scripts, usually based on JavaScript. It is generally used for rendering graphs and figures for articles.

The pros