SignalWire's roots have always been in video communications, as our founder Anthony Minessale founded the FreeSWITCH project, one of the most popular open source media servers in the world.

Today, we want to bring that experience and that power to new market with a new release that makes it easy to implement video communication solutions based on the SignalWire platform.

Our demo is a very simple application that will generate a random user name and room, unless you pass them in via GET using respectively the user and room parameters.

The SignalWire Video API

Our video product consists of two different APIs that interact to help you build applications.

The server-side API is a collection of REST endpoints used to create and manage room, and add access tokens to them.

On the client side, the Javascript SDK allows you to build a custom video experience in a simple, standard-based way.

SignalWire Video is built around our unique MCU component. A Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) receives the media from each participant and mixes it into a resulting video stream that is then sent to each person in the room.

That creates a much better experience because no matter what the number of participants each user will always only send one video stream and receive only one.

Beta documentation is here and will be updated as new features are added.

Configuration

Start by copying the env.example file to a file named .env, and fill in the necessary information.

The application needs a SignalWire API token. You can sign up here, then put the Project ID and Token in the .env file as SIGNALWIRE_PROJECT_KEY and SIGNALWIRE_PROJECT_KEY, together with you full SignalWire Space URL as SIGNALWIRE_SPACE.

If you sign up for the first time, your account will start in trial mode, which you can exit by making a manual top up of $5.00. You can find more information on the Trial Mode resource page.

Running the application

If you are running the application with Ruby on your computer, run bundle install followed by bundle exec ruby app.rb after configuring the .env file.

To use the bundled Docker configuration, set up your .env, build the container using docker build . -t swvideo then run the application with docker run -it --rm -p 4567:4567 --name swvideo --env-file .env swvideo.

After starting the process with either of the two methods, head to http://localhost:4567.

If you would like to test it with friends and colleagues, we recommend ngrok. After starting the tunnel pointed at your port 4567, you can use the URL you receive from ngrok to access the application and to share the link with other participants.

Application code

On the server side, we have methods to create a room and retrieve a token to access it. Each of your users needs a separate token.

You can find the complete application here, but what follows is an abstract of how we create a token in Ruby, then how we access the room in the browser.

On the client side, we simply set up the client to put the video in a root element, and connect.

Sign Up Here

If you would like to test this example out, you can create a SignalWire account and space here.

Your account will be made in trial mode, which you can exit by making a manual top up of $5.00. You can find more information on the Trial Mode resource page.

If you are looking for more information about using SignalWire, refer to our Getting Started guide.

Please feel free to reach out to us on our Community Slack or create a Support ticket if you need guidance!