We are excited to introduce OpenVidu v3. This is a major milestone for the project and represents many months of hard work by the entire OpenVidu team. It involves a complete overhaul of OpenVidu’s internal technologies, architecture and deployment. All in order to offer the best self-hosted real-time media solution out there. Let’s take a quick look at everything you need to know about OpenVidu v3.
What are the reasons for this major release?
At OpenVidu we are always striving to offer the latest technology available to deliver the best results in your real-time applications. We developed Kurento more than a decade ago as a powerful SFU, and built OpenVidu on top of it to provide an easy-to-use framework to develop videoconferencing applications. As Kurento grew older and some limitations became apparent (mainly related to performance), we decided to evolve OpenVidu to support mediasoup instead of Kurento as its internal media server.
And now it is time to take the next big step: we are now integrating LiveKit into our stack. LiveKit is a cutting-edge WebRTC stack that is open source and certainly the most popular choice in the community in recent times.
What has changed?
Being now based on LiveKit’s fantastic stack, OpenVidu v3 incorporates the latest innovations and optimizations in real-time media. There are so many new features and improvements that we have to summarize them in different categories:
Media optimizations
These low-level features will take your application perfomance to the next level:
- Simulcast for VP8 and H264 video codecs.
- Scalable Video Coding (SVC)for VP9 and AV1 video codecs.
- Dynamic Broadcasting (Dynacast) for minimizing bandwidth consumption. It pauses the publication of any video layer that is not being consumed by any subscriber.
- Adaptive Stream for UI-based video quality optimization. It sends to each user the minimum bits needed to display high-quality rendering based on the size of the video player. If a video player is hidden, the video stream is paused. This allows you to scale your application to large video rooms with thousands of users.
- Audio RED (REDundant Encoding) and Hi-fi audio for crisp, clear, high-quality audio streams.
- Audio DTX (Discontinuous Transmission) for detecting silence in audio tracks and reducing their bandwidth.
- WHIP for low-latency media ingestion.
New features
- End-To-End Encryption (E2EE) for the ultimate secure communication.
- Fine-grained roles for participants.
- More SDKs for your application client: Android, iOS, Flutter, Unity, React Components.
- Improved server-side media filters architecture: it is now decoupled, making it easier to develop custom filters and to scale them.
Deployment
- Improved High Availability deployments: now all required services are included. External services are not needed anymore.
- Improved architecture, making Master Nodes much more scalable. Now one Master Node can handle many more participants.
- Lighter observability stack. We have migrated from Elastic to Prometheus, Loki and Grafana.
- Better connectivity for participants behind firewalls, thanks to TURN over TLS being available by default.
Better deal for your money
All ENTERPRISE features will be available in the PRO tier:
- mediasoup support (experimental)
- High Availability deployments
Most PRO features will be available in the COMMUNITY tier:
- S3 recordings
- Broadcasting
- Network quality
- Virtual background
- Phone call integration
- A real administration dashboard is now available in COMMUNITY edition
And lastly, iOS and React Native support are now also included in COMMUNITY edition.
Better developer experience
- OpenVidu PRO evaluation mode: OpenVidu PRO now includes a special execution mode that can run without a license (limiting the duration of sessions and number of participants). It is the perfect way to develop and test your OpenVidu PRO application for free.
- OpenVidu v3 offers a local deployment with an easy way to test mobile devices inside your network. You can forget about these instructions: now there is no need to install SSL certificates or configure proxies to locally develop your app.
These and many other features will make your real-time application more efficient, performant, reliable, secure and future-proof. You can read more about what OpenVidu v3 has to offer in our new site.
Visit Updating from OpenVidu v2 to OpenVidu v3 to update your app to OpenVidu v3.
