I’ve recently done some research into WebRTC and specifically on how to stream media captured in the browser to a server. Initially I thought I could use something like Kinesis Video Streams and have AWS do the heavy lifting for me. Unfortunately this turned out way more complicated than I had anticipated so I started looking for other options.

That is when I came across Media Servers such as Medooze, OpenVidu, Janus and Jitsi. Medooze caught my attention since it appears to scale very well and offers a NodeJS based server.

It did take me some time to find a meaningful demo for Medooze and then to get it running. So I thought I briefly document the steps here to get a demo for Medooze up and running (note this only works on Linux or Mac OS X):

1. Head over to the media-server-client-js project and clone it.
2. Run the following commands:

npm i
npm run-script dist
cd demo
npm i

3. Get the IP address of your current machine:

ifconfig | grep "inet "

4. Using this IP, launch the Medooze server in the demo directory:

node index.js [your IP]

5. Head to a browser and open the URL https://%5Byour ip]:8000 (for instance https://10.0.2.15:8000. Accept the SSL certificate for your localhost.

You should now see the demo page:

Clicking the buttons will create video streams:

The animation on top of the remote button is a video stream taken from a local canvas and animation/video to the right is the same stream relayed through the server.

So the client sends a stream to the server, the server sends that stream right back and the client then renders that stream.

During my local testing I encountered an issue when adding tracks with codecs (VP8, H264) that I have filed and link here for reference: Adding tracks with Codecs does not work