If you’re new to WebRTC, Jitsi was the first open source Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) and continues to be one of the most popular WebRTC platforms. They were in the news last week because their parent group inside Atlassian was sold off to Slack but the team clarified this does not have any impact on the Jitsi team. Helping to show they are still chugging along, they released a new feature they wanted to talk about – off-stage layer suspension. This is a technique for minimizing bandwidth and CPU consumption when using simulcast. Simulcast is a common technique used in multi-party video scenarios. See Oscar Divorra’s post on this topic and that Fippo post just last week for more on that. Even if you are not implementing a simulcast, this is a good post for understanding how to control bandwidth and to see some follow-along reverse-engineering on how Google does things in its Hangouts upgrade called Meet.
