Mediasoup WebRTC Media Server

Mediasoup is a cutting-edge WebRTC Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) for Node.js, designed to build scalable real-time video, voice, and data communication applications with ultra-low latency. Created by Iñaki Baz Castillo and José Luis Millán Villegas at Versatica in 2018, the project has over 6,100 stars as of 2026 and is used in production by hundreds of video conferencing, live streaming, and remote collaboration platforms. Key features include: Selective Forwarding Unit (routing media streams between participants without transcoding, scaling to hundreds of simultaneous participants with minimal CPU and bandwidth usage per participant), media processing in C and Rust (RTP packetization, depacketization, bandwidth estimation, simulcast, and SVC layer selection implemented in high-performance native code), multi-codec support (VP8, VP9, H.264, H.265, AV1, Opus, and AAC codecs with per-codec configuration), simulcast (publishing multiple quality layers of the same stream, enabling receivers to switch quality based on available bandwidth), Scalable Video Coding (SVC support for VP9 and AV1 with temporal and spatial layer selection), DataChannel (low-latency binary and text data channels for chat, file transfer, and real-time data exchange), Direct API (C++ API for embedding into non-Node.js applications and Rust API via mediasoup-rust), pipeToRouter (inter-router media piping for horizontal scaling across multiple server machines), request-response over WebSocket (control protocol for creating transports, producers, consumers, and data producers), observability (Prometheus exporter for monitoring producer, consumer, and transport metrics), and TypeScript support (fully typed API for both server-side and client-side development with comprehensive type definitions).