Using easyRTC for conference calls?

[Ray Jender]

I am rather new with WebRTC.  I did try a demo peer 2 peer connection and it was rather impressive.
Wow....no plugins needed, no app install needed.  Beautiful!

Now I have an idea for an app, but it involves a 1 to many connection with the following high level requirements:

1. An administrator starts up a video/audio WebRTC session.
2. Multiple users, with proper authorization credentials,  can browse and connect and see/hear the video/audio of the administrator
  (the number of users can be a small group (2-10) or a very large group (10-50 or more) )
3. The users cannot see each other
4. The users can hear each other, controlled by administrator
5. The administrator can control which user(s) he/she can see.
6. The administrator can control the audio (mute users) for all users.

At this point, I would be happy to accomplish #1 and #2 for now.
For sure this is more complex than the simple p2p demo I ran.

My problem is what apps would I need to accomplish #1 and #2?
I know I would need to create the web site on the server.
And, I think I need an MCU for conference calling correct?  But which one?

I am not sure how the communication between the requesting browser, the
server and the MCU would work?  Is there a high level architecture document
I can learn from?

Also, I would like to keep all of the required software on my own servers.

If you can list the minimum applications I would need (open source), I think I am just dangerous enough
to install, configure and get them working.  I assume easyRTC would be one?

I would greatly appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Ray

[Eric Davies]

Hi Ray,

Inside our own subnet, we had no problems with one client broadcasting it's audio/video to 14 other clients. We were quite amazed. My suspicion is that the encoding gets done once and that result is shared across all the outgoing streams. So, if your administrator (the guy everybody wants to see) has sufficient upload bandwidth (figure on 300Kbs per connection), you may not need an MCU for small numbers. The only trick to one-way transmission is the non-sending parties make the following calls before calling the administrator:

    easyrtc.enableAudio(false);

    easyrtc.enableVideo(false);

Remote muting is pretty easy, the administrator just sends a message to the other guy who then interprets it.

That said, we don't currently support an MCU. However, take a look at http://lynckia.com/licode . They supply an open source MCU. It doesn't appear to handle anything except the fan-out issue, but if that is all you need, then it would be sufficient. 

In our upcoming enterprise branch, we do plan to support an MCU but it will probably be a commercially provided one because we haven't seen an open source one that supported the feature set we want: resolution changing (useful for mobile), vp8 <-> h.264, and recording.

Eric.

[Ray Jender]

Thanks for the response Eric.  At least it is encouraging!

I'm sure I'll have more questions as I move forward with this.

Thanks,

Ray