janus-gateway VS werift-webrtc

> 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++)

I am really excited about https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer. It has examples ready for ESP32 etc....

When working on KVS I wasn't familiar with the embedded space at all. I saw 'heavyweight' embedded where you were running on Linux. Then you had RTOS/No OS at all. I wasn't prepared for these devices at all. If we can make WebRTC work in the embedded space I think it will really accelerate what developers are able to build!

Remotely driven cars, security cameras, robots in hospitals that bring iPads to infectious patients etc... Creative people are building amazing things. The WebRTC/video space needs to work harder and support them :)

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I love how diverse the WebRTC space is now. Outside of this implementation you have plenty of other options!

* https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc (Typescript)

* https://github.com/pion/webrtc (Golang)

* https://github.com/webrtc-rs/webrtc (Rust)

* https://github.com/algesten/str0m (Rust)

* hhttps://github.com/sepfy/libpeer (C/Embedded)

* https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/ (C++)

* https://github.com/sipsorcery-org/sipsorcery (C#)

* https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel (C++)

* https://github.com/elixir-webrtc (Elixir)

* https://github.com/aiortc/aiortc (Python)

* GStreamer’s webrtcbin (C)

See https://github.com/sipsorcery/webrtc-echoes for examples of some running against each other.

This is not true, there are actually multiple WebRTC implementations in different languages besides the reference library: aiortc (python), libdatachannel (C++), sipsorcery (C#),webrtc-rs (rust), werift (Typescript), and Amazon Kinesis (C)

There's a native implementation that requires no binaries here: https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc

Maybe I'm missing something but how is this one preferable?

Lots of great WebRTC implementations exist. Do you want to stick with node.js?

I am a big fan of https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc it is pure Typescript.

Check out https://github.com/sipsorcery/webrtc-echoes for all the other implementations.

werift(TypeScript)

https://github.com/shinyoshiaki/werift-webrtc (Typescript)