I interviewed mediasoup’s co-founder, Iñaki Baz Castillo, about how the project got started, what makes it different, their recent Rust support, and how he maintains a developer community there despite the project’s relative unapproachability. mediasoup was one of the second-generation Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs). This second generation emerged to incorporate different approaches or address different use cases a few years after the first generation of SFUs came to market. mediasoup was and is different. It is node.js-based, built as a library to be part of a serve app, and incorporated the Object-oriented approaches used by ORTC – the alternative spec to WebRTC at the time. Today, mediasoup is a popular SFU choice among skilled WebRTC developers. mediasoup’s low-level native means this skill is required.
Technology
Calculating True End-to-End RTT (Balázs Kreith)
Balázs Kreith of the open-source WebRTC monitoring project, ObserveRTC shows how to calculate WebRTC latency – aka Round Trip Time (RTT) – in p2p scenarios and end-to-end across one or more with SFUs. WebRTC’s getStats provides relatively easy access to RTT values, bu using those values in a real-world environment for accurate results is more difficult. He provides a step-by-step guide using some simple Docke examples that compute end-to-end RTT with a single SFU and in cascaded SFU environments.
The WebRTC Bitcode Soap Opera (Saúl Ibarra Corretgé)
Saúl Ibarra Corretgé of Jitsi walks through his epic struggle getting Apple iOS bitcode building with WebRTC for his Apple Watch app.
Optimizing WebRTC Power Consumption (Markus Handell)
The performance of WebRTC in Chrome as well as other RTC applications needed to be improved a lot during the pandemic when more people with a more diverse set of machines and network connections started to rely on video conferencing. Markus Handell is a team lead at Google who cares a lot about performance of […]
How does WebRTC End-to-End Encryption work? Matrix.org example (Dave Baker)
One of WebRTC’s great features is its mandated strong encryption. Encryption mechanisms are built-in, meaning developers don’t (often) need to deal with the details. However, these easy, built-in encryption mechanisms assume you have: 1) media is communicated peer-to-peer and 2) a secure signaling channel setup. Most group-calling services make use of a media server device, […]