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Version: 0.5.0-rc0

Basic Concepts

This section outlines Jellyfish building blocks. We suggest reading this before you proceed, as these terms will be recurrent in the following chapters. Enjoy your exploration!

Room​

In Jellyfish, a room serves as a holder for peers and components, its function varying based on application.

For instance, within a video conferencing system, a Jellyfish room represents a single online meeting or a channel accommodating multiple users for conversation.

On the other hand, in a broadcasting system setting, one room will be a container for two components - one responsible for receiving stream from a streaming host (e.g. via RTMP) and the other one responsible for converting this stream into an HLS playlist ready to be broadcasted via CDN.

Component​

A component is a server-side process that publishes or subscribes to tracks. Example components are:

  • HLS component - subscribes to all other tracks and creates from them an HLS playlist ready to be broadcasted via CDN
  • RTSP component - connects to the remote media source (e.g. an IP camera) and publishes its media to be consumed by other components or peers

Peer​

A peer is a client-side entity that connects to the server to publish, subscribe or publish and subscribe to tracks published by components or other peers. The peer's process is spawned after the peer connects to the server. At the moment, there is only one type of peer - WebRTC.

Difference between Component and Peer​

The most important difference between a component and a peer is that component is a purely server-side thing. It starts its work right after adding it to the server. On the other hand, a peer is something that has to connect to the server. Therefore, peers are allowed to open so-called signaling channels to the server. See also Example Scenarios.