April 2022 Summaries

This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to create a video streaming server using Node.js. It covers installing necessary packages, creating routes for requests from the frontend, handling metadata of videos, implementing actual video streaming, and setting up a simple HTML5 frontend. The server uses HTTP 206 code for partial content while streaming video chunks. The article also discusses the architecture of the application and provides an example of how to use it with a frontend stack.

Video conferencing software has seen massive growth in usage during the pandemic, with a 627% increase in downloads of video chat and online conference apps in North America. As it stands, users expect certain apps to have in-built audio-video communicative capabilities. The numbers attest to this. Video conferencing improves communication for 99% of people. Video meetings boost productivity by 50%. By every metric, video conferencing capabilities improve user experience. However, embedding audio-video communication into an app from scratch requires time, effort, and investment. Instead, it's much easier to implement an audio video using an SDK designed for that purpose. Agora is an API-first SaaS company that started by providing real-time audio and video broadcast APIs. Now, it has expanded to a platform that allows customers to create rich, in-app audio-video features, such as real-time recording and messaging, embedded video, and video chat as well as interactive live video streaming. Twilio originally offered an API for automating traditional phone calls and SMS text messages. Today, it provides programmable APIs to help developers build business communication (in-app and otherwise) across the customer journey. They allow devs to integrate audio and video interactions into multiple platforms. Jitsi is a collection of open-source projects designed to help users build and implement secure video conferencing options. Among its offerings, Jitsi Meet is best known for providing video conferencing services. Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing app that offers SDKs for devs to implement audio-video communications and relevant capabilities within new or existing apps. 100ms provides live audio-video SDKs that enable devs to add powerful, extensible, scalable, and resilient audio-video features into their apps with half a dozen lines of code.

In this tutorial, we will be building a video conferencing application similar to Skype using the 100ms React SDK. The app will possess several features such as meeting name setting, authentication token generation, room joining, audio and video toggling, hand-raising functionality, participants list display, screen sharing, and chat feature. We will be utilizing Material UI for component library and basic CSS styling. Prior knowledge of CSS, JavaScript, React.js (functional components and hooks), and 100ms SDK is assumed. The project source code can be found on GitHub.