Deploying media servers for WebRTC has two major challenges, scaling beyond a single server as well as optimizing the media latency for all users in the conference. While simple sharding approaches like “send all users in conference X to server Y” are easy to scale horizontally, they are far from optimal in terms of the media latency which is a key factor in the user experience. Distributing a conference to a network of servers located close to the users and interconnected with each other on a reliable backbone promises a solution to both problems at the same time. Boris Grozev from the Jitsi team describes the cascading SFU problem in-depth and shows their approach as well as some of the challenges they ran into.
media server
All posts tagged media server
Media servers, server-side media handling devices, continue to be a popular topic of discussion in WebRTC. One reason for this because they are the most complex elements in a VoIP architecture and that lends itself to differing approaches and misunderstandings. Putting WebRTC media servers in the cloud and reliably scaling them is even harder. Fortunately there are several community experts with deep expertise in this domain to help. One of those experts who has always been happy to share his learnings is past webrtcHacks guest author Luis López Fernández.
webrtcH4cKS: ~ Kurento.org: WebRTC, Computer Vision, Augmented Reality, Awesome (Luis López Fernández)
Augmented reality demonstration using the open source Kurento project
Sending real time communications from point A to point B? That functionality is relatively easy with WebRTC. Processing the media in real time to do something cool with it? That is an area I find a lot more interesting, but it is a lot tougher to do. When I was building my Motion Detecting Baby Monitor project, I wished I had some kind of media server to handle the motion detection processing. That would give me some flexibility to take the processor intensive algorithm off of my phone and stick that in the cloud if I wanted to save on battery. That also got me thinking – if you can do motion detection why not apply other more advanced image processing algorithms to the WebRTC stream? How about facial recognition, object detection, gesture tracking or many of the other cool features that are popping up all the time in the popular Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) project? I wrote this dream off as science fiction for another year or two.
