Janus WebRTC Server

Janus is a general-purpose, open-source WebRTC server designed to facilitate the deployment of real-time communication applications, including video conferencing, streaming, recording, and IoT device communication. Developed by Lorenzo Miniero, Simon Pietro Romano, and the Meetecho team at the University of Napoli Federico II, first released in 2014, with over 8,300 stars as of 2026. Key features include: modular plugin architecture (core server handles WebRTC connection establishment, ICE, DTLS, and SCTP, while plugins implement specific use cases including Video Room for conferencing, Streaming for one-to-many broadcasting, Recording and playback, Video Call for peer-to-peer, Text Room for chat, Echo Test, and NoSIP for proprietary signaling), SFU capabilities (Selective Forwarding Unit mode in Video Room plugin routing media streams without transcoding for scalable conferencing), ICE support (full ICE, Lite, and TURN relay support with native libnice integration for NAT traversal), multi-codec support (VP8, VP9, H.264, AV1, Opus, G.711, G.722, and PCM via DTLS-SRTP), simulcast and SVC (receiving and forwarding multiple quality layers with per-subscriber layer selection), server-side recording (per-participant mjr recordings with post-processing tools for webm and opus conversion), RTP forwarding (forwarding received media via RTP to other servers, and ingesting RTP from external sources including GStreamer and FFmpeg), REST API (HTTP-based signaling for browser and mobile clients), WebSocket transport (real-time signaling for browser clients), RabbitMQ and MQTT integration (message queue-based signaling for distributed deployments and IoT), data channels (reliable and unreliable data channel support for chat, file transfer, and control messages), and Docker deployment with configurable plugins.