Implementing a WebRTC endpoint in GStreamer: challenges, problems and perspectives

WebRTC is one of the main trends on the multimedia arena in the last few years. The ability of bringing real-time audio and video to WWW browsers opens new horizons for developers to create context aware customized applications for inter-human communications. However, for WebRTC technologies to work seamlessly in WWW applications, it’s necessary to manage with a number of present and future complex challenges.

In this talk, we present the experience of the Kurento Media Server team in creating a WebRTC endpoint for GStreamer. We describe the main problems and limitations basing on current GStreamer status describing which parts of WebRTC standards can be currently implemented with GStreamer and which parts require further evolutions and efforts from the community. We will also describe the plans and drafts that are emerging at different standardization groups, including the WebRTC WG at W3C and the RTCWeb WG at IETF. Basing on this, we will try to forecast how WebRTC technologies in particular, but also how real-time multimedia communications in general, may be evolving in the next couple of years and the activities that the GStreamer community should be considering for adapting to these evolutions.

In particular, we shall introduce in detail topics such as the following:

    The evolution of ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment)
    Congestion control for RTC streams
    Implementing WebRTC security securely
    Implementing and optimizing the AVPF profile for RTP
    Benchmarking WebRTC: stats metrics
    Managing sensor data through DataChannels

Dr. Luis Lopez is associate professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, where he carries out different teaching and research activities in areas related to WWW infrastructures and services. His research interests are concentrated on the creation of advanced multimedia communication technologies and on the conception of Application Programming Interfaces on top of them. The aim of such technologies is to simplify the development of professional real-time communication services satisfying complex and heterogeneous requirements. Dr. Lopez research ideas have generated more than 60 scientific and technical publications and have been included into important research and industrial projects including FI-WARE (http://fi-ware.org) and NUBOMEDIA (http://www.nubomedia.eu). Currently, Dr. Lopez is leading the Kurento.org initiative: an open source software infrastructure providing server-side capabilities for WebRTC with features such as group communications, computer vision, augmented reality, transcoding, mixing and much more.