janus-gateway VS Snapcast

> despite WebRTC mostly being about client/client communication

This is actually kind of a misconception, though it’s an understandable one given that WebRTC is almost always pitched as a peer-to-peer protocol.

In practice, most people using WebRTC for video are sending their video to a server, not directly to another client. It’s pretty safe to assume that most people who use your app are going to need TURN, and at that point, you’re not really doing peer-to-peer at all, so you might as well just have your browser-based app talk to a server that’s pretending to be another browser.

These servers (called Selective Forwarding Units or SFUs) can operate like a TURN server in the case of a one-on-one call, but they can also multiplex everyone’s feeds in the case of a larger conference (peer-to-peer 5 person calls would require each participant to send 4 copies of their video) and often have extra features like the ability to record calls, transcode streams or convert to other protocols.

The one I’ve used a lot is called Janus[0], it’s open source and has good docs, I recommend people check it out if they’re interested in getting deeper into WebRTC or other video streaming tech.

[0] https://janus.conf.meetecho.com

OpenTalk is a young project for creating online meeting software similar to Jitsi or BigBlueButton. It is a completely new development, and while it is not a fork of an existing open-source project, it integrates with other projects such as the Janus WebRTC server, Redis for volatile state, RabbitMQ for communication between server instances, and PostreSQL for persistent state.

I've been looking into Janus WebRTC Server due to the ability for Uv4L to join Janus rooms (I'm building a RaspberyyPi doorbell)

A related answer to the above is to check out Janus. It's a general purpose WebRTC server that has RTMP and FTL ingest support. I think it's also batteries not included, but I think it's what Glimesh is based on.

I've been using Janus gateway for similar. Pretty easy to setup.

A number of open-source projects also exist, which give developers a great head start if they're looking to build their own infrastructure - the most popular of these include Jitsi, Mediasoup, Janus, and Pion. These projects provide a layer of abstraction and expose a number of helper functions to perform various tasks, such as creating transports, etc. They have helpful guides on how to get started, but you would still face the aforementioned issues regarding scaling, resources, etc.

This all changes when you are actually a domain expert: You can treat the various components as a "white box" because you see the forest for the trees and can make cross-cutting assumptions which will inherently make the code faster. I've noticed a lot of projects written by domain experts are often these giant clusterfucks of C that violate pretty much every guideline there are so many Medium blogs about, and yet they're very stable and widely used. See: https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway for example.

Yes, there are many self-hosted options out there. https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway works well for multi-party video with up to about 15 users in a room assuming everyone has a reasonably reliable connection.

- Janus (C / C++)

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast!

Works perfectly on pis scattered around the house.

Snapcast: The cheapest and most modular option is deploying small form factor linux clients (raspberry pis, or any host all) with an audio interface (3.5mm, RCA, or otherwise), and connect the audio output interface to your choice of speaker. Snapcast is the open-source multi-room brains. It works well in my experience, but it is tricky to get setup properly to start with. Spotify Connect support is possible so you can launch your Spotify listening session from the Spotify app. Snapcast also integrates into Home Assistant for ease of adding/removing clients from the active listening sessions (yes, plural. You can have multiple listening sessions from multiple audio input sources at once).

- snapcast - this server/client software will broadcast synchronized audio from any source to any snapcast client. The server and clients can all run on the same computer. Individual clients are assigned to their own usb soundcard. Source and volume for each client is controlled through the webpage and/or homeassistant.

I have a music library on my home server that I use mopidy to play via the iris plugin integrated into my home assistant UI. It plays over Snapcast which streams over the network to multiple devices in the home with independent volume control. I can fire up the Snapcast client in my phone to get it going there as well, which does work over vpn if I'm away, though I generally just fire up the files from my phones SD card for out-of-home listening. I recently started using whipper on Linux to extract audio from craigslist cds.

https://mopidy.com/

https://mopidy.com/ext/iris/

https://github.com/badaix/snapcast

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

You want SnapCast. You'd run snapserver on your Linux box and snapclient on your Pi's. Snapserver has support for Airplay (via shairport-sync) and Spotify (via librespot). I recommend using MPD for your music library, as I don't think PlexAmp can output audio in a way that's useful for snapserver.

Instead of splitting audio from the jack output you can create a Little network with a router and have more rpi streaming music over It using snapcastsnapcast .

If you're into the idea of an open-source client/server architecture, then there's Snapcast. If you have a few Raspberry Pis (one per output source) or any other box that can run Linux and has an audio out interface, then this is cheap and easy with an active Home Assistant integration too.

I'm setting up a whole home audio set up and looking for suggestions in the design. Currently, I run Snapcast on Raspberry pis connected to various soundbars or amps. It's working ok, but has issues (Mostly on some of the 2.4GHz WiFi Pis that can't keep up with the bandwidth).

For the multi-room audio, check out snapcast. If you like it, we could try to convince the Symfonium dev to add the ability to cast music directly to snapcast, which I would love to have!