IMPORTANT NkMEDIA is still under development, and not yet ready for general use.
NkMEDIA is an scalable and flexible media server for WebRTC and SIP. Using NkMEDIA, it is easy to build powerful gateways, recorders, MCUs, SFUs, PBXs or any other media-based application. It is written in Erlang.
NkMEDIA is made of a very simple and efficient core, and a set of plugins and backends that extend its capabilities. At its core, it is only capable of controlling peer to peer calls. However, activating plugins like nkmedia_janus (based on Janus), nkmedia_fs (based on Freeswitch) and nkmedia_kms (based on Kurento), it can perform complex media operations in an very simple way. Since each backend has very different characteristics, you can use the very best tool for each situation. For example, Janus is very lightweight and a great choice to write proxies and SFUs. Freeswitch has full PBX capabilities (allowing you to park and transfer calls to multiple destinations without starting new WebRTC sessions, detect dtmf tones, etc.) and has a very powerful video MCU. Kurento is the most flexible tool to design any media processing system.
NkMEDIA can be managed using NetComposer API, using the same API for all backends. This means that the session creation functions, starting publishers, recordings, etc., will be nearly identical for all backends, while NkMEDIA will adapt it to the specific backend.
NkMEDIA has full support for Trickle ICE and non Trickle ICE clients and servers. You can connect clients that does not support trickle at all to all-trickle backends like Kurento, and trickle clients to non-trickle servers like Freeswitch, automatically.
You can control NkMEDIA through the management interface, creating any number of sessions. It offers a clean, very easy to use API, independent of any supported backend. You don't need to know how to install or manage Janus, Freeswitch or Kurento instances. When you order an operation to be performed on the session (like starting a proxy, recording, starting an SFU, etc.), NkMEDIA selects the right backend that supports that operation automatically and in a complete transparent way. For operations supported by several active backends (like echo) you can also force the selection.
In real-life deployments, you will typically connect a server-side application to the management interface. However, being a websocket connection, you can also use a browser to manage sessions (its own or any other's session, if it is authorized).
See the User Guide for a more detailed explanation of the architecture.
- Full support for WebRTC and SIP-class SDPs
- WebRTC P2P calls.
- Proxied (server-through) calls (including SIP/WebRTC gateways, with or without transcoding).
- Full Trickle ICE support. Connect trickle and non-trickle clients and backends automatically.
- MCU based multi audio/video conferences
- SFU (or mixed SFU+MCU) WebRTC distribution.
- Recording (with or without transcoding).
- Abstract API, independant of every specific backend.
- Downloads, installs and monitors automatically instances of Janus, Freeswitch and Kurento, using Docker containers.
- Supports thousands of simultaneous connections, with WebRTC and SIP.
- Robust and highly scalable, using all available processor cores automatically.
- Sophisticated plugin mechanism, that adds very low overhead to the core.
- Hot, on-the-fly core and application configuration and code upgrades.
- Security-sensitive architecture. The backends do not expose any management port, only RTP traffic.
- nkmedia_janus: Janus backend with support for webrtc echo, calls through the server, SFUs and SIP (in and out) gateways. Also dyamic muting of audio and video, bandwith control and recording.
- nkmedia_fs: Freeswitch backend with support for echo, calls through the server, MCUs and and SIP (in and out) gateways. SIP calls can participate in MCU sessions or be connected to webrtc endpoints.
- nkmedia_kms: Kurento backend with support for echo, calls through the server, SFUs and and SIP (in and out) gateways. SIP calls can participate in SFU sessions or be connected to webrtc endpoints. State of the art recording support, inmediately playable and seekable.
In the future, NkMEDIA will add support for:
- Multi-node configurations based on NetComposer.
- Support for multiple Janus, Freeswitch and Kurento boxes simultaneously.
1. User Guide
2. API Guide
3. Cookbook
4. Advanced Concepts
5. Roadmap
Currently, NkMEDIA is only available in source form. To build it, you only need Erlang (> r17). To run NkMEDIA, you also need also Docker (>1.6). The docker daemon must be configured to use TCP/TLS connections.
git clone https://github.com/NetComposer/nkmedia
cd nkmedia
make