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Showing posts from April, 2019

Implementing P2P-SFU transitions in WebRTC

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One of the more disruptive aspects of WebRTC is the ability of establishing P2P connections without any server involved in the media path.   However this doesn’t scale well for multiparty audio/video calls as the bandwidth and cpu required for a full mesh of N:N P2P connections is too much in most of the cases. But the fact that you support multiparty calls doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t consider using P2P connections when there are only two participants in the room and switch back to the SFU when the third participant joins or when you need to enable some recording or broadcasting capabilities only available in the SFU. In fact this approach of using P2P when only two participants are connected and switching to the SFU has been successfully implemented in many products in the last years ( Jitsi , Hangouts , Facebook ).   The implementation of this feature is not trivial but it provides enough advantages to be worth it: Minimise the network hops reducing the end to en