May 2022 Summaries

LiveKit Community Day celebrates the growth of LiveKit, an open source end-to-end stack for WebRTC. Since its launch in July, it has been embraced by developers and builders alike. Contributions from Pion, a server-side WebRTC project, have significantly influenced LiveKit's development. Community members have also made valuable contributions to LiveKit, such as Dennis' work on universal egress and Brint's improvements to the SFU's node selection algorithm. Additionally, PopStage, an open source tool for virtual workshops and trainings, has chosen LiveKit for its media stack due to its superior features compared to commercial offerings. The LiveKit community continues to grow, with many developers finding it helpful in overcoming challenges of building with WebRTC.

Universal Egress is a new set of tools and APIs that simplify exporting audio and video from LiveKit. It allows developers to export media from any open room using three options: Room Composite for exporting an entire room, Track Composite for exporting synchronized tracks of a single participant, and Track Egress for exporting individual tracks. The service automatically transcodes streams when moving between protocols, containers or encodings. Universal Egress is designed to keep load off the SFU and provide flexibility over varying load and queue depth. It aims to build a bridge from WebRTC to any destination speaking any protocol, format or encoding.

LiveKit 1.0 is an open-source WebRTC stack that aims to provide end-to-end optimizations for video conferencing software. It includes adaptive stream, a subscriber-side feature that automatically adjusts the resolution and frame rate of video elements based on their size and visibility. Additionally, it offers dynamic broadcast, a publisher-side feature that conserves upstream bandwidth by monitoring how subscribers consume a publisher's video and adjusting upload characteristics accordingly. LiveKit also provides congestion control through its StreamAllocator controller, which determines the available bandwidth and decides how to forward data to a subscriber efficiently. These features work together seamlessly to ensure high-quality video and audio in large meetings with minimal scaling concerns.

LiveKit, a platform for real-time audio and video experiences, has released a beta version of its React Native SDK. This enables developers to use the same codebase across iOS and Android devices, reducing maintenance overhead. The SDK is built on top of LiveKit's JavaScript SDK and uses react-native-webrtc for WebRTC implementation. Developers can now create rich, real-time audio and video experiences with fewer resources and less effort. Future updates will include adaptive stream and dynamic broadcast features to manage bandwidth in larger rooms.

The React SDK by LiveKit has been split into two packages - @livekit/react-core and @livekit/react-components. This change allows developers to choose between a minimal set of helpers with no additional dependencies in react-core, or pre-built components with styled UI elements in react-components. The new structure aims to reduce bloat in the dependency tree and offer more flexibility for future updates. Developers can now download only the dependencies they need, while still having access to higher-level abstractions.

The article discusses the integration of real-time audio and video features into Unity WebGL applications for browser-based metaverse projects. It explains how developers can leverage LiveKit's Unity WebGL SDK to manage game state within the Unity/C# execution environment while using separate JavaScript code to utilize the browser's WebRTC implementation for audio and video. The article also highlights the challenges faced in developing this bridge, such as maintaining state on the JS side and bridging textures from the browser to Unity. Furthermore, it provides a sample application that showcases the power of LiveKit's Unity WebGL SDK by rendering each player's camera feed as cyberpunk-style interlaced video with spatial audio for communication. The article concludes by encouraging developers to explore building virtual worlds and rich 3D spaces using this technology.

Next week, starting from Monday, May 16th at 10am PT, LiveKit will announce a series of updates and releases every day for their Launch Week. Expect new SDKs, React updates, version 1.0 of LiveKit, Egress improvements, and Community Day spotlighting community projects and contributions. The week will conclude with a virtual happy hour on Friday, May 20th at 6pm PT.