galene VS ion-sfu

I would like to recommend Galene: https://github.com/jech/galene

Runs in my raspberry pi, a single small executable, like in the old good times.

> Do you happen to know of others by any chance.

There's Galene, <https://galene.org>. It's easy to deploy, uses minimal server resources, and the server is pretty solid. The client interface is still a little awkward, though. (Full disclosure, I'm the main author.)

galene - basically selfhosted zoom/jitsi

What latency are you trying to do? Will the professor being communicating with the students while doing this? Will the students all have the same bandwidth, or will you want multiple renditions (low, med, high quality levels)?

If you want AV1 you will not be able to use RTMP. The protocol is orphaned/deprecated, so avoid if possible!

If I was building it this is what I would do, and my reasoning.

* For capture + encoding I would use OBS. You will want to use something that is easy for users to install configure. Professors will also have lots of custom requirements when it comes to layout etc... it will be tempting to do a ffmpeg command directly, but it will fall apart quick I believe.

* To get AV1 out of OBS I would use FFMPEG output. I would have it send RTP. RTP is used to carry video in a sub-second manner. This is the same protocol that WebRTC uses. You know have AV1 + low latency.

* Then for users to watch I would use WebRTC. That will allow them to watch in their web browser. Conceptually it will be like this https://github.com/pion/webrtc/tree/master/examples/rtp-to-w... this takes the RTP packets and puts them in the browser.

Lots of great projects exist that you could use for 'RTP -> WebRTC' like https://galene.org/ and https://livekit.io/ I would suggest checking them all out!

If you have more questions/want to talk to people in the video space always happy to chat on https://pion.ly/slack :)

galene

The most lightweight all-inclusive central solution for video conferences I know is Galene. It runs in under 200 MB RAM.

Even though the default UI is extremely simplistic, I very much like galene. It bundles all the components you need in a single binary. Even a TURN server so you don't have to fiddle with coturn. Not to mention that it's very resource efficient.

There's nothing particularly difficult on the server side — a quality SFU should be capable to handle on the order of 400 video flows per core, and there are quite a few high-quality free software SFUs available (Janus, Jitsi, ion-sfu, livekit, Galene). To give some perspective: we're using Galene for lectures, and our single-CPU server uses around 40% CPU usage in a room with 120 students (who keep their cameras switched off during the lecture, of course, and only occasionally switch them on to ask questions).

As the grandparent mentioned, the problem is the client side. Since there is no standard videoconferencing protocol, every free software project needs to develop their own clients. And it's difficult for a free software project to have the manpower and expertise to develop quality clients for the web, Android and iOS, so in effect what we currently have are mostly half-baked web clients.

There is some hope, though. The IETF have been working on standard protocols for ingress (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/wish/), and if their protocols get deployed, you'll be able to use the same streaming software (think OBS) or IP camera with multiple distinct videoconferencing servers. An interoperable interactive videoconferencing protocol is nowhere near, but as more people understand videoconferencing technology, there is some hope that people will get together and start working on multi-protocol clients (remember Pidgin?).

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Galene (https://galene.org), and I've been actively participating in the Pion community (https://github.com/pion/webrtc) and collaborating with the authors of ion-sfu (https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu) and LiveKit (https://github.com/livekit).

go get: module github.com/pion/ion-sfu@upgrade found (v1.10.8), but does not contain package github.com/pion/ion-sfu/cmd/server/grpc/proto

Really appreciate that they have a Protocol project, really helps quickly get a sense of what's under the hood. It's just a bunch of protobuf messages, but that's a super helpful reference, and nice to not have it embedded in one of the various other projects: https://github.com/livekit/protocol

Notably using the well known extremely well reputed super battle hardened Pion sfu, ion: https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu