I recently started looking into building a similar web cam project using WebRTC, except sending ascii images over the datachannel instead of encoded video. So, I was pleased to see this project making it happen. You could easily implement this with XMPP/SIP over WebRTC.
That's interesting. But if you already have a graphical browser which supports WebRTC, why do you still need the ascii? Or is there a terminal browser with WebRTC support?
Bandwidth: I'm often in areas where bandwidth is a premium but I'd still like to video chat with family. And besides, I absolutely hate dropped frames, rebuffering etc etc: I just want to engage in a conversation with friends and I don't care that it's HD video. Applications like Skype don't let you drop the bandwidth (for reasons I don't understand) and dropping it in WebRTC makes the compression almost unreadable. As this project has shown, ASCII video can really be quite legible and probably a lot more forgiving for lower frame rates.
