noiR - Redis + ion SFU

WIP NOTICE: noiR is pre-alpha and unstable, do not build on noiR

noiR: it's like R(edis)-ion, but in reverse

Features

• Blazing fast full-featured WebRTC SFU for modern video conferences
• Room Limits - Limit the number of members, publishers, or the maximum age of a room
• "Channels" - A channel is a 1-publisher fanout room with publish authentication
• (WIP) Basic Authentication - Require a password to join, or require a password to publish
• (WIP) Admin API for creating rooms, managing members and seeing health statistics
• (Planned) Stream Recording - Automatically record all streams in a room and upload them to S3
• (Planned) Play into Room - Play a video or audio file from local disk or URL into a room or channel
• (Planned) Admin Dashboard

About

noiR is a redis-backed SFU cluster based on ion-sfu. A selective forwarding unit is a video routing service which allows webrtc sessions to scale more efficiently.

noiR listens on the same ports as ion-sfu and accepts the same commands, while adding admin commands, support for managing membership, and a very naive single-datacenter scaling model.

Existing ion jsonrpc clients can connect to any noiR node in the cluster. When noiR receives a message from a peer, it keeps the websocket open with the peer for signalling, but all messages are forwarded over redis to whichever noir node is hosting the room.

noiR keeps track of how many publishers or subscribers are in a room, and manages client lifecycle and cleanup.

Clients (callers) can connect directly to noiR over public jsonrpc interfaces using ion-sdk-js or any regular ion-sfu client; management commands get sent over a separate jsonrpc interface.

**Admin APIs are WIP, currently you must submit admin commands via redis**

Usage

First of all, "don't use noiR"! That's just reasonable advice -- it's a very young project, we are novice golang devs, the architecture is unproven, and the whole API might change. If you do use noiR, you will immediately find bugs, or need new features, and we welcome all the help you can send! noiR might never be more than a neat demonstration without your help.

Docker Run Demo

1. Ensure redis is running on your localhost

docker run -p 6379:6379 --name redis sameersbn/redis

2. Start noiR with Demo Mode at http://localhost:7070

docker run --net host ghcr.io/net-prophet/noir:latest -d :7070 -j :7000

(instead of host networking, you can use -p 7070:7070 -p 7000:7000 -p 5000-5020:5000-5020/udp)

Build Binary

make build

Build Docker Image

docker build . -t net-prophet/noir or make docker

Progress

• Build a naive prototype redis messaging server for ion-sfu
• Client JSONRPC API :7000 - JSONRPC-Redis Bridge (so the ion-sfu/examples work)
• "Doing It Live" - Adapted my own dependent codebases to start using noiR immediately
• "Demo Mode": Bundled ion-sdk-react storybooks for instant testing in a browser
• Learn to write golang unit tests; write unit tests :'(
• (50%) Ensure cleanup safety, no dead peers
• (80%) Room permissions - Allow/Deny new joins, channels, basicauth room passwords, admin squelch + kick
• Admin JSONRPC API :7001 (management commands and/or multiplexed client connections)
• Admin gRPC API :50051 (management commands and/or multiplexed client connections)
• Stream permissions - Fine-grained control over audio/video publish permissions
• Load test cluster mode with ion-load-tool (depends on gRPC API)
• In-cluster SFU-SFU Relay (HA Stream Mirroring, Large Room Support)
• Cross-cluster SFU-SFU Relay (Geo-Stream Mirroring)

Motivation

We started this project as an exercise to develop our golang skills, but also to scratch an itch -- ion-sfu aspires to be the most lightweight SFU, the simplest possible version of itself. noiR is, by contrast, highly opinionated and with more batteries included. If you're building a next-generation video conferencing solution, and want a lightweight SFU that's ready out-of-the-box, noiR might be right for you.

Contributing

We eagerly invite contributions and support. The golang might be messy or suboptimal, due to inexperience, and drive-by code reviews or notes on how to improve are greatly appreciated. If you'd like to work on noiR but aren't sure how to help, you can get in touch with oss [@] netprophet [.] tech or open an issue.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for full text