Brussels / 31 January & 1 February 2015

schedule

Scalable Video Conferencing with Jitsi Videobridge

Using Simulcast, DataChannels and adaptive streaming for Free scalable conferencing


The talk will describe the problems of scalability for libre video conferencing and how they are being addressed by the new video routing architectures. It is gong to go over optimization techniques such as Last N and Simulcast. The presentation is going to then go over the Jitsi Videobridge FLOSS video router and talk about how developers can use it in their video conferencing applications.

Until recently high quality, multi-party video conferencing has been an ever elusive dream to many of us. While it has existed for tens of years already, it has always been been prohibitively expensive and a luxury that only rich corporations could afford.

Readily available broadband, has opened up new horizons in the field however. The traditional video mixing servers (MCUs) are becoming irrelevant today and are being replaced by infinitely more scalable video routers, also known as Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs).

Google Hangouts and the underlying Vidyo technology they used, have been one of the more popular examples in the past couple of years. Early 2014, jitsi.org also released Jitsi Videobridge, an open source video router (SFU) that is compatible with WebRTC and that allows FLOSS developers around the world to start building scalable video conferencing applications.

This lecture is going to go over some of the more important concepts of scalable video conferencing, such as selective routing, simulcasting and layered video, RTCP termination and others.

We are then going to look into the privacy issues related to video conferencing today, discuss the possibilities for truly confidential multi-party calls and the interesting impact, both positive and negative, that WebRTC has on the possible solutions.

Speakers

Photo of Emil Ivov Emil Ivov