by admin | Nov 7, 2025 | WebRTC
In this new world of post covid-19, video collaboration is the new normal irrespective of the industry segment. As the work is going remote, video collaboration is a must in order to keep that human touch. A secure video collaboration tool is a need of the hour but there is no one size fits all tool available even today as every need is not the same. Building a video collaboration tool doesn’t mean it should cost a lot of time and resources. There are very good open source libraries available with their unique strength and weaknesses. But as the open source is not designed while keeping your unique needs in mind, a good amount of resources in terms of time and money need to to be dedicated to create a video conferencing system from scratch. We are here to help as a consultant in the complete life cycle of your product development for your unique use case. Listed below are the high level things to consider for developing a production grade video conferencing app.
The steps of building a video conferencing app can broadly be divided in to the below mentioned steps.
Defining your need (real need, aka the product road map)
Building a video conferencing system is not like building another web app. It is much more complicated than that as it has much more complexities in terms of technical things to deal with. That’s why we help our clients with the need definition so that we are crystal clear before writing even a single line of code. This also helps in setting our esteemed customer’s expectations properly and helps the development team in achieving the defined milestones in a timely manner without time and cost overruns. Click this link to Learn more about building a product road map.
Choosing the correct tech stack
Choosing the correct tech stack to build your app is very critical to meet the timelines as defined in the product road map. A product road map is a bunch of assumptions which meets the reality through the correct tech stack. There will be considerations like availability of good developers in the chosen stack, availability of reusable open source components according to the architecture, architecting the app to support agile development practices while sticking to the defined time lines, modularity along with flexibility and maintainability of the code base etc. There is no right or wrong approach here. Based on the use case, the tech stack and the architecture will vary. But overall, from our experience we can say that Javascript as a language, Nodejs as server and Reactjs as frontend language go well for building a production grade video conferencing system.
Building the app
Once the product road map is there, tech stack is decided and a high level architecture is in place, It is time to write the code. The code has to be written in a modular manner so that is will be easy to maintain a large code base a t a later point in time when the use case grows which leads to a swell in the number of lines of code. Keeping things DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) also becomes super important to follow as the code base grows. There are many other coding best practices to follow so that it is easy for a new developer joining at a later stage to understand the codebase within a short period of time. Below is a link to 50 coding best practice to follow for Javascript.
Testing the app
Testing the app is super critical to deliver the consistencies knowing that the best of the best developers also make mistakes while writing codes. Testing a WebRTC app in it’s length and breadth also become super critical not only to test the logic written in the code directly but also to test the indirect part of it like testing the app in different network conditions, different browsers, different devices etc. Here is a nice blog written by a globally renowned WebRTC evangelist about his view on WebRTC testing. Here is the link.
DevOps (Cloud deployment / Scaling)
Devops plays a very critical part in success or a failure of a WebRTC app. WebRTC needs at least 2 kind of servers(application and signalling) which can go upto 6 servers( application, signalling, media, recording, NAT Traversal and recording post processing). Specifically media and recording servers need good CPU, Memory and Network bandwidth even for 1 successful call. The ideal media server is a c5.xLarge VPS which is 4 core CPU with 8-16gb of RAM and 10GBPS network. Ideal recording server is a c5.large VPS. It is always good to prefer a compute intensive VPS for media and recording related things. Scaling from 1 meeting to 100 meetings is more of an Art than science. It needs a good command over dev-ops best practices and a deep knowledge of your chosen cloud vendor to achieve good results in scaling.
Post implementation
As WebRTC is a moving target, keeping a good post implementation support team is critical to the success of the product. The point to note about the post implementation support is that, the service can break any time due to not fault of your code but for some random change in a popular browser after a recent upgrade. Therefore it is important to keep a good post implementation support team for your production grade WebRTC app.
We recently started our consulting practice to help others plan and execute their video conferencing trek in a better way. Do drop us a mail at hello@centedge.io about your plans and we will be happy to help you.
by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC
As this post is being written, videoedge magic rooms v2.0 is now out and has opened it’s doors for public beta starting from today i.e. 21/01/2021. The biggest change from v1 to v2 is that private rooms are now available for use with all the features that were available on our public demo room released in the v1 last month. As we were completely occupied with fixing the bugs reported by our early users, we didn’t get any time to write a v1 release note. We are sorry for that. Going forward, we will try to write a release note for every major release. We also are hugely thankful to our early users who used the buggy v1 and gave us the important feedback in order to make the v2 possible.
Below are the list of primary features which are currently available and ready for use.
- Unique shareable room link
- Private meeting rooms for registered users. The public demo room is available as usual for all the non registered users.
- Pre-call Camera /Mic / Speaker selection
- Group conferencing up to 6 participants (Our code can handle up to 30 but our tiny demo server cannot !)
- In call Mute/ Un-mute and camera on /off
- Moderator mode for being able to authenticate users before joining the room
- Moderator able to mute/ un-mute others, switch camera off of others (can’t switch on others camera due to privacy concerns) and kick others out of the room
- Viewer mode enabled for people to join as a viewer / listener only without participating in the ongoing discussion
- Screen-share by one or more moderator or participant. Viewers can’t screen-share!!
- Publish an IP camera to the room for everybody to view. This is particularly useful for security and surveillance use cases where a video conferencing can be done to take real time decisions while viewing IP / cctv / drone cameras. Keep in mind that, it currently supports an input source in the RTSP format only.
Here is the link to the recently released videoedge magic rooms.
In case you are facing any issue with the videoedge magic rooms while using it or it is not working for some reason, don’t hesitate to let us know the issue and we will try to fix it up with priority. In case you like it and want us to add a new feature for your use case, please let us know as well. We are reachable at hello@centedge.io
by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC
Centedge Magic room is here, finally! It was long last month where many battles had to be fought, both inside inside and outside of VS code(the code editor we use!) to reach here. The whole story will take it’s own time to come out.
Now coming to straight to the point as this post is going to be a release note for our latest release. This is the most anticipated release from our side as it has all of the things needed to run a meeting, audio/video, screen sharing, recording, chat along with innovative room configuration options to configure your video rooms for any kind of use case from a intuitive dashboard.
Here are the key features.
- Unlimited group meetings in personal room(without recording !)
- Configure and use magic rooms with all features including recording
- 2 configurable magic rooms with up-to 100 hours of usage and 1 GB of free cloud recording are included in the free plan
- Option use it as a shared service at meet.centedge.io or have it at your own custom sub domain like arbalest.centedge.io as a dedicated service
- Fully possible to host it in your own enterprise cloud / data centre
- Perfectly possible to consider this as a base video room and build your own service on top of it with our custom support and customisation plans
- All cutting edge things like Simulcast/SVC, Auto scaling of infrastructure based on demand, active speaker detection, real time bandwidth monitoring etc. are either already implemented or in the pipeline. To check simulcast implementation, join the room from a desktop and a mobile device to verify that they both are using different bit-rates (XX Kb/s) for the same user video.
Currently once either has to build a video conferencing service from scratch if one want to own the service but it needs a good amount of time, effort and expertise for the same. The other option is to rent out from somebody with less cost but you really can’t own the service. Our goal is to provide you the best of both worlds where we let you own your own video conferencing service without renting it out as well as without spending a good amount of time and effort in building it. With us, you can own a video conferencing service within a day or 2 with resources as low as $$$$ / year and use it for unlimited time and unlimited users.
We also are working on a not for profit plan so that not for profit organisations looking for dedicated video conferencing applications for their needs can now adopt our dedicated solution at a unbelievable price of 1$$$ / year with support and up-to 3 customisation requests included in that plan. A separate detailed post will be shared in a couple of days with relevant details regarding this offering.
Here are the full set of features.
- Unique room Link
- Select Camera / Mic
- Live streaming up-to 20 participants
- Group conferencing up-to 12 participants
- Mute/ Un-mute
- Video On/Off
- Option to join as presenter / viewer
- Room Moderator settings
- Screen share
- Publish IP camera to meeting Room
- web/mobile browser(Chrome/Safari)
- Recording (Sever side Only)
- Store recordings in AWS S3
- Unlimited personal room usage (without recording!)
- Create Static and / or Dynamic room from dashboard
- Active speaker detection
- Real time bandwidth monitoring
Note :- As we are running on a small scale infrastructure based on the available credits we have from AWS, the service may not be as great as a production grade video conferencing application. The purpose of this app is to let everybody know that there are guys like us also exist who build good things silently and let the app make noise at its own time. We know that we may not have reached there yet so that our app will make noise but we will reach there soon.
If you are looking for building a video conferencing app either for video banking, video insurance, video surveillance,video education or video health, do let us know. We will be super happy to help you build your own app or enhance your existing one to make it better. There is also another great option to adopt our service as a managed service for your own use case and build on top of it.
Here is the link to our latest video rooms:- Magic rooms
We are reachable on email at hello@centedge.io. You also can chat with us using the chat widget on this website. We typically respond within 5 minutes or sooner for chat and 1 day (max.) for email . You can schedule a free 30 mins call with one of our senior consultants using this link for resolving your doubts/ concerns not only about our services but also about how your existing services using WebRTC for video conferencing or live streaming can be improved. Here is our LinkedIn page to stay connected.
Happy to help.
by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC
What can be the ways to find a needle in the haystack? One of the ways can be to deploy multiple people with magnifying glasses based on the area of the haystack and then announce a big prize for the person who can find the needle. In this case the the amount of prize money will be directly proportional to the enthusiasm among the people to find the needle.
There can be another way where one individual can attach a magnet at the end of a wooden stick and try to sweep the floor with with this intelligent device. The needle will automatically come to the magnet. No need to deploy a lot of people and money.
These days, trying to find a good WebRTC developer is like trying to find a needle in the haystack.WebRTC has grown 100x during 2020 especially due to the pandemic situation. Video became the default medium for teaching/learning, banking, insurance, online only events and WebRTC became the default technology. In this situation where more and more enterprises as well as startups are adopting WebRTC on an on going basis, the demand for good developers is rising exponentially. But there are very few WebRTC developers globally who know WebRTC in its totality and have build more than one application from scratch. There are people who know a couple of things by reading from the internet but that is not enough to know things that is needed for building a production grade WebRTC application. As an employer looking for WebRTC developer, one has 2 choices now. First choice is to hire a developer who knows a little bit WebRTC and train him /her house. In this approach, the percentage of developers becoming productive in a short time will be less to very less. The reason is not that the developer is not good or the content is not good but the amount of time the developer takes to be able to contribute actively to the project is highly unpredictable. Some developers take a month or others may take 2 months but still don’t get the things properly. This is the first approach of deploying people with magnifying glasses to find a needle. Here there is a 50% probability that one will get the needle. There is still a gap of 50% of not finding the needle.
Unfortunately, there is no second approach of deploying a magnet to find the needle in this case. As there are very few WebRTC magnets available globally, they have simply become unaffordable or unavailable. When we ourselves trying to find good developers, we had go through the same situation.When we floated the application for a WebRTC developer position last month, 40+ candidates applied where as only one candidate was able to complete the coding test given by us as a 1st level selection criteria. Being in WebRTC for 7+ years now, we now realised that it is a serious problem not only for us but also for many others.
In order to solve this, we took down some time a prepare an intensive hands-on 3 -4 weeks workshop for all the new people who are going to join us. The course material is carefully designed in such a way that even the non WebRTC guys will be able actively contribute to projects in a month. We now plan to take full stack developers good in MERN/PERN(Mongo/Postgres, Express,React,Node) without being bothered about their WebRTC knowledge and make them either Frontend WebRTC developer, Backend WebRTC developer, Full stack WebRTC developer or a DevOps WebRTC developer.
Below is a brief of the way we are planning to conduct the workshops in the coming months for the people we hire in our team.
Week 1: Build a baseline MERN/PERN app from scratch with basic user authentication, api routes, proper folder structure etc.
Week 2: Build a basic signalling server for a p2p video calling app using WebRTC. Here they will learn how to use the WebRTC APIs like getUserMedia/getDisplayMedia to capture the camera or screen, RTCPeerConnection to connect both peers in order to transfer media and a little bit of RTCDataChannel
Week 3: Enhance the p2p application to a full fledged application with rooms by integrating a SFU like janus or mediasoup(by default we will be using mediasoup).By end of this week, the candidate will know how to build a video conferencing application using a media server.
Week 4: Here they will learn how to deploy the application in a cloud like digitalocean or AWS, so that the application can now be accessed over internet.
Week 5(optional): Dedicated to advanced topics like scaling the application, active speaker detection, real time bandwidth monitoring, advanced UI optimisation for large group calls, reading the real time stats of the call etc
It has been structured based on our 7+ years of experience in dealing with WebRTC related stuffs and how people without much knowledge of WebRTC tend to learn things fast when the course is structured properly.
We are planning to hire 1 or 2 devs in each quarter based on growth, but we still need to put that much effort in training them well as low quality of devs has a direct impact on the quality of the product. In each of our training programs, 8-10 guys can be accommodated comfortably. Therefore, if you also planning take the route we have taken to hire good WebRTC devs, then do let us know.We can plan the training program together as well.
Feel free to adopt the above course structure for your training programs as well. If you need even more details about our in-house training program or the content of it, feel free to drop us a email at hello@centedge.io.
Hope this helps.
by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC
As the pandemic is making the world more virtual, the popularity of WebRTC is increasing in a great speed. The usage of WebRTC has been increased by 100x in past one year, since March 2020. This is creating a huge demand for WebRTC developers but there are not many good developers as of today. Here the demand is outstripping supply by a good margin for last one year and the trend is going to continue as it is difficult to become a good WebRTC developer. Why? Because it is not very easy to grasp the totality of this technology and also developers fall in to the trap of common myths and loose interest in the mid way. Here we will try to describe the common myths and also burst them so that it will help aspiring developers come out of the trap.
Myth 1: WebRTC is p2p!
WebRTC is NOT only P2P, it is N2N, where N is any number of your choice!
Thinking WebRTC is p2p is like thinking only bicycles can be made using wheels!! We all know the reality. Wheels can be used starting from bicycles till airliners like AirBus A320 and all kind of transportation vehicles in between. The thing that one need to understand is the amount of complexity involved in developing a bicycle and a modern airliner are in two completely different levels. Almost all the times, aspiring developers get an example of how to build a bicycle aka a p2p WebRTC based video conferencing example and think that this is what they can make at best using wheels aka WebRTC. We don’t think any body in their wildest dream can think of getting an step by step example on how to build an modern airliner like Airbus A320. It is the same with WebRTC as well ! Here also you can’t expect to get a github repo which is google meet grade video conferencing application. It is simply not possible for anyone to put an effort to build things like Gmeet by investing millions of Dollars and the give it for free in github. What generous people can give is a bare bone heavy duty media server to build a video conferencing application on top it.
The task of building a production grade video conferencing app can primarily be divided in to 4 categories.
- The frontend part where one will deal with the UX/UI along with audio/video streams, screen sharing, moderator settings etc
- The backend part where one will deal with things like user authentication, real time connection management using some thing like websocket or a 3rd party service like pusher. this can be called as a combination of application + signalling server
- The media server part where one handles the audio video streams and forwards them to other user based on the signalling server logic. The job of media server aka SFU is to forward the audio video streams to other users.
- The devops part where one manages the application load based on the number of users join the room and the number of rooms getting created.
How to build a production grade video conferencing application is a learning in itself and there are no shortcuts available for the same without doing the hard work.
Myth 2: Free STUN server by Google is just enough!
People who have built their first p2p application by following a github repo or a youtube tutorial, most probably have used the free STUN server provided by google for learning purposes. They tend to use the same while building their commercial grade applications after a couple of months or years as well because they remember that it worked well when they built their first demo application. The free STUN server by google is like the first computer / laptop gifted by your parents while you were still a student. That was capable enough to run the all the programming languages you studied in your school or college. But that is not sufficient enough for you when you join your first job. There you get a new desktop / laptop which is suitable for a production grade working environment. Both the laptops / computer may run on similar kind of hardware or even software. So, what really changes is the percentage of dependability on the device you use for your work is more than the 1st device gifted by your parents. It is exactly same here. A production grade STUN aka TURN server is far more dependable than the free STUN server by google.
A STUN server is server which helps the peer connection in detecting the public IP address of any device which is needed for transporting the audio/video stream over the internet. A commercial STUN server( aka TURN server) is essential for a production grade application for minimising call drops. People interested in knowing the reason can drop me a mail at hello@centedge.io and we will be happy the reply back with the explanation on why it is needed.
Myth 3: TURN servers are really not needed, STUN is just enough!
Many time developers developing their 1st commercial grade video application complains about both parties not able to see each others video in certain random scenarios. They find it hard to find out why is it happening. Majority of the calls are just working fine but 10% (approx.) are not working fine! Majority of the times in such scenarios, the culprit is the network where both parties are simply not able connect directly through each others public IP address provided by the STUN server. This happens because a demon blocks the network while both of devices try to connect using each others public IP address. A DEMON ??!! Yes a DEMON and the name of the demon is Symmetric NAT. A symmetric NAT is a technique used by enterprise network admins to block all kind of inbound access to their internal devices in their LAN. When this happens the Public IP is not capable enough to connect to a device behind a Symmetric NAT. In this case, a TURN server comes to the rescue and becomes a broker between both the peers and relays the media from each other in a bi-directional manner.
According to statistics, out of 100 calls made using WebRTC, 10 -15% of the calls happen to relayed through a TURN server. Using a TURN server, one can decrease their call drop percentage. The other good news is that A STUN and TURN server come bundled as one package and one can deploy one server to serve both the purposes. COTURN is a open source STUN and TURN server which can be deployed at your own datacenter or on cloud.
Once it is deployed, one can check if the server is working as expected or not using this WEBRTC trickle ice test page. If one gets both the reflex and relay candidates in this page, then the server configuration will be considered to be proper.
These are 3 most common myths among aspiring WebRTC developers as experienced by us. There may be more to this list. We will try to modify this post by adding other popular myths as and when we encounter them.
If you aspire to become a full stack WebRTC developer with at least 2 years work experience in MERN stack, we would love if you join our developer network to stay updated with all the latest changes in WebRTC and related technologies as well as get WebRTC related consulting / job opportunities, if available. Here is the link to fill up the form to show your interest in joining our developer community. Once we get your request, we will get in touch with you for on-boarding you to our developer community.
If you have any queries related to your own WebRTC implementation, feel free to drop us a email at hello@centedge.io.
by admin | Nov 6, 2025 | WebRTC
While watching a video by Belinda Goodrich, where she mentions that how a trip to India changed her life and shares three quotes with the audience while ending her talk.
The quotes are
Honour over Hustle
People over Profits
Service over Sales
All three quotes made me thinking as how can I make sense of all these quotes and how can I implement even one in my current work life. The first quote is what I try to implement when dealing with people and I realise the immediate benefits I get out those discussions/ conversations where I try to follow this. The second quote may not be highly relevant for us as of now as the product we are building is yet to become profitable. Whenever it becomes profitable in near future, it will be for the effort of the whole team and the team will be the cause of that profit but not vice-versa. Therefore I think it is justified to put the team first and profit later. The third quote is what made me think deeply that how we can embed the service component in to our upcoming sales process. This is a good time to do such a thing as we are in the starting phase of building our sales team from scratch and we are yet to hire our first sales engineer!
As an individual and team, I have built a couple of video conferencing applications from scratch for various use cases including video banking, video teaching learning, tele-health, video commerce etc. When I built my first video conferencing system way back in 2014, it was purely for fun. I built to have a video call with my friends without using Skype or Hangout, the 2 most popular video conferencing services of that time. After that I built an interview recording system for a College Professor and his PhD candidate for some research purposes. Afterwards, I built a couple of video conferencing and live streaming systems as proof of concepts for advanced use cases of those times using things like Kurento, OpenCV, face detection/ recognition, in video object detection for use cases like in video e-commerce etc.
It was in the year 2016, when I thought of doing something serious about this video thing and started building an ed-tech startup in order to help people teach and earn money online. It had all the components in it like live streaming, recording, hand raising, social learning, content sharing among different groups and sections of students etc. We built all this in 6 -12 months of time. It was around early 2017, when we released our 1st version for public use and got some good as well as bad feedback. The response was not that great especially in Indian market due to 2 -3 primary reasons. The data cost per GB was way too high( INR 250,$3.5/GB on 3g speeds), 4G speed was not there which is good for video calls and unavailability of suitable consumer hardware devices with teachers to teach online. After trying out for couple of months, we went to colleges to check if they will be willing to buy our platform as a subscription to promote anytime anywhere teaching learning. We specifically told the colleges that this will enhance your existing teaching learning experience and prepare you for a future where online teaching will be a common thing(which is the case now!). The colleges told us that such a future is at least a decade away from that time i.e. from 2017. It was not that great of a success trying to sell our platform as a SaaS. Then we asked them if they can let us know what they wanted to buy to which they said that they wanted to buy an ERP. We decided to give it a try to check if we can integrate an ERP into it, which took us a good amount of time. Though it was not making sense to us at that point of time, we decided to go with customer demand. When we took our new thing to them , they said that they only want an ERP but not online teaching learning thing. If we wish to give them for free, then they may try to use it. All the video tech guys out there know it very well that except companies like Microsoft and Google with huge war chests, tiny tots like us won’t be able to provide free video conferencing / live streaming services to colleges with the resources the services demand to run efficiently. Finally, we had to shut things down at March 2019 as things were not going as expected and we were still some distance away from break-even.
When I look back today, I ask this question to myself that what I would have been done differently at that time so that the result would have been different today? I was not able to find any answer to this question until March 2020. But from April 2020, all things started to become more and more clear. Now I know a definitive answer(almost!) to this question and the answer is if I would have been chosen a Service over Sales route, there would have been a different outcome. There were guys at that time as well, who were having troubles teaching offline but they were fantastic guys in what they taught. They were ready to try us out and ready to cover our bare minimum costs. But we didn’t like them at that time because they didn’t meet the textbook definition of how a typical customer of a SaaS product should look like. We didn’t give much importance to them rather than chasing our typical customers and we came to the conclusion which we got at March 2019. If we would have chosen to give our wholehearted focus on satisfying those who were interested in taking our product as a Service to them, the result would have been different today!
May be that’s why there is a saying that experience comes from not so good decisions!
With that experience, as we are going to launch a product again soon, we are dedicated this time to do the Sales as a Service. To begin with, we have decided to offer our whole platform along with all the features including the cutting edge once to a chosen few purely as a Service without any kind of Profit for us for a time period of 12 -24 months. We are going to provide our complete platform to a selected few Not for Profit organisations. Why only to provide to not for profit organisations because we will also be working on a non-profit basis from our side.
Here is what we are going to provide.
- Our complete platform on an independent subdomain of your choice as a dedicated service
- Future upgrades and enhancements
- Customer support and trouble shooting support
- Bug fixing if any
Here is who you should be.
- You should be a not for profit organisation from any part of the world.
- You should be either from edu-tech, fin-tech, insure-tech, surveillance-tech or health-tech domain.
- You should have an existing product or service in the market for at least 2-3 years serving your end users.
- You should have a need in existing product or service where video can enhance the success of your product / service, either significantly or marginally.
- You should be willing to pay for your cloud bills. In case we get enough credits from our cloud partner, we can try to cover some part of this as well but we can’t assure you that it will happen. It may happen or mayn’t happen as well.
- Last but not the least, we need a small commitment fee(in 1$$$) only once. We need this in order to confirm that you are committed to integrate video our rooms in order to enhance your own value proposition and you are not in the experimental stage of your own offering where you are not sure that video can enhance your own value proposition or not.
If you are looking for building a video conferencing app either for video banking, video insurance, video surveillance,video education or video health, do let us know. We will be super happy to help you build your own app or enhance your existing one to make it better. There is also another great option to adopt our service as a managed service for your own use case and build on top of it.
Here is the link to our latest video rooms:- Magic rooms
We are reachable on email at hello@centedge.io. You also can chat with us using the chat widget on this website. We typically respond within 5 minutes or sooner for chat and 1 day (max.) for email . You can schedule a free 30 mins call with one of our senior consultants using this link for resolving your doubts/ concerns not only about our services but also about how your existing services using WebRTC for video conferencing or live streaming can be improved. Here is our LinkedIn page to stay connected.
Here is the Link to the video from which I got the inspiration.
