How Mediasoup makes BigBlueButton 2.4 better

Faster webcam and screen sharing with more concurrent users at a lower CPU usage are the key benefits of turning on MediaSoup on BigBlueButton 2.4.
11 Jan, 2022

Due to its versatility, performance and scalability, Mediasoup becomes the perfect choice for building multi-party video conferencing and real-time streaming apps.

BigBlueButton 2.4 release contains initial support for using Mediasoup instead of Kurento for handling WebRTC video streams (webcams and screenshare) and listen only.

Following are the benefits of MediaSoup in BigBlueButton 2.4:

  1. Reduces the load on system.
  2. Users can share webcam and screen much faster than Kurento.
  3. Helps us to avoid lots of WebRTC errors such as 1020 while trying to share a webcam or screen.

How to enable MediaSoup on your BigBlueButton 2.4

  1. If your server is behind NAT (otherwise skip to step 2):
    Let $SERVER_IPv4 be your server’s public IPv4
    yq w -i /etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-sfu/production.yml mediasoup.webrtc.listenIps[0].ip “0.0.0.0”
    yq w -i /etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-sfu/production.yml mediasoup.webrtc.listenIps[0].announcedIp $SERVER_IPv4
    yq w -i /etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-sfu/production.yml mediasoup.plainRtp.listenIp.ip “0.0.0.0”
    yq w -i /etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-sfu/production.yml mediasoup.plainRtp.listenIp.announcedIp $SERVER_IPv4
  2. If you wish to enable IPv6 in mediasoup (otherwise skip to step 3):
    Let $SERVER_IPv6 be your server’s IPv6
    yq w -i /etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-sfu/production.yml mediasoup.webrtc.listenIps[1].ip $SERVER_IPv6
  3. Follow to control mediasoup usage on server and then sudo bbb-conf –restart
    Config file path: /usr/share/meteor/bundle/programs/server/assets/app/config/settings.yml
    Set signalCandidates value to false
    Set mediaServer value to mediasoup
    Set videoMediaServer value to mediasoup
    Set listenOnlyMediaServer value to mediasoup

Our experience in using Mediasoup

We have observed the following Performance improvements: 

  • With 120 concurrent users and 3 webcams shared, we saw a CPU utilization 16%. This is far below than what we have observed earlier (though we are unable to give precise improvement in CPU usage because of the nature of comparison).
  • Our users confirmed faster connections to webcam, screen share and Listen Only mode.

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