Kurento Media Server: experience bringing Gstreamer capabilities to WWW developers

GStreamer is a powerful framework, but creating applications using it requires a high degree of expertise, which is not available on the common WWW development community. However, the emergence of technologies such as WebRTC is increasing the interest of media technologies on that community, which opens a relevant opportunity of reinforcing the GStreamer community.

In this talk, we present the experience of Kurento Media Server for bringing GStreamer capabilities to WWW developers. We describe how we have created an abstraction layer on top of GStreamer for making available complex media capabilities through simple and seamless APIs enabling the creation and management of dynamic pipelines. We describe the limitations, problems and challenges we have found in doing so as well as the feedback gathered from WWW developers in relation to the simplicity and appropriateness of GStreamer for solving their needs. Through this feedback, we will analyze the evolutions further capabilities that WWW developers may be demanding in the near future.

To conclude, we present the roadmap of Kurento Media Server for answering to such demands using and extending GStreamer.

José Antonio Santos is a programmer and a software engineer working at Naevatec. He has been working in research, specially in the field of multimedia communications for the last 6 years. As part of this research, the Kurento project was born. Currently he is leading development of Kurento Media Server inside the Kurento project as well as working in integration with client APIs (java and JavaScript).