Video Conferencing Platform

Business Situation

Due to high speed Internet connection, reduced cost of video capture and display technology and increase in personal video conferencing systems or applications has made Video conferencing a preferred source for communication. Not only does it find use in corporate meeting rooms, but there is a rise in acceptance of the technology in other areas such as healthcare, education, retail, human resources and market research. A disruptive technology which has helped many companies save millions on travel compels the rest to have it as well.

With this idea in mind, our client who is an IT services provider for the Media and Entertainment Industry approached ValueCoders to develop a webRTC based video conferencing platform which would enable users to connect and invite others for starting a audio-visual conference call.

How the System/Application Works?

• To amke a call, the users have free access to login where they can invite/add and find their contacts
• Depending on the contact's presence (Available/Offline) information the application then allows the logged in user to call his contact
• In case the user wants to connect to a non-user then she can share a unique URL specifically created for this to connect and set up a conference

Architecture Diagram

It is a hosted unified communications service based on client-server architecture as well as support for peer-to-peer architecture which includes video and voice as well as chat, file sending, screen sharing, presence, and more. The application makes the use of WebRTC as the core technology. All the communication takes place using web-socket messages. The following diagrams would help understand the system better.

Meeting App

This is a web application which is completely separate from browser or native client application. It provides the WebRTC connection when opened. This meeting application is implemented with the help of EasyRTC libs which uses socket.io as signaling server. The chat, file sending, adding peer in call, screen share features are provided in this web application.

Some of the main features of the meeting app are as follows:

• Sharing Files: Easyrtc file sharing api allows users to send and receive files. We can drag and drop or select files to send. The check box on the left can be marked to send the files to all the connected users in the meeting room.
• Screen Sharing: Easyrtc screen sharing api is used for sharing screens. This also helps in presenting the sales proposal virtually. This function requests that screen capturing should be used to provide the local media source rather than a webcam.
• Medical Journal - Objective, peer-reviewed evaluations of new FDA-approved drugs, and new information on previously approved drugs.
• Shared Browsing: Just like screen share, this feature helps to show your browser tab to other users while browsing. You can also pass control to other users to click and navigate the browsing too.
• Group Chat: This feature enables up to a maximum of four people to join in a group chat and have access to the files and other media shared in that particular chat window.
• Image Capturing: Image capturing is done by making use of the settings menu available on the dashboard.
• Recording of Video/Audio : The chat conversations between peers can be easily recorded for future use.

Dashboard

Here’s how the application dashboard looks like. The buttons are color coded for representing status of the users such as Green for Online, Gray for Offline, Red for Busy, Blue arrow for call forwarded, Red with line for Donot Disturb.