Glossary

AAC

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio codec. AAC was designed to compress audio with higher fidelity than MP3. AAC is the standard format for many types of media, like Blu-Ray and HDTV.

Active Channel

A channel that has at least one connection using it is called an active channel.

AEC

If you ever hear yourself speaking a few hundred milliseconds after you have spoken, most likely it's because the remote peer does not have Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC). The remote peer is playing your audio stream through the speakers, then picking it up with the microphone and streaming it back to you. Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC) is a method designed to remove echoes, reverberation, and unwanted added sounds from a signal that passes through an acoustic space.

AVR

AVR stands for Adaptive Video Resolution. With AVR, the resolution of the sender's video is changed according to the recipients' constraints. For more information, see Perform Adaptive Video Resolution.

Application

Application refers to a specific set of configurations saved in the LiveSwitch Console. These configurations impact how LiveSwitch performs in the application you are integrating LiveSwitch into.

App

The application you create using the LiveSwitch SDK is referred to as app. You can create multiple apps using the same Application ID that you created in the LiveSwitch Console.

Bundling

Bundling minimizes resource usage during connection setup, and during the call itself, because it uses a single socket to transmit data payloads rather than using one socket per stream. Specifically, core transports don't need to open sockets, forward additional ICE candidates to peers, conduct additional ICE connectivity checks, or conduct an additional DTLS (encryption) handshake.

Client

A client is an instance of your app. If the same app runs on different devices, a new client is created every time the app restarts.

Device

A device is the hardware that the user uses to join your app, such as a laptop or a mobile phone.

Frame Rate

The number of frames per second (FPS) that are sent and received in a video stream.

H.264

H.264 is a digital video compression standard that uses half the space of MPEG-2 (the DVD standard) to deliver the same quality video.

ICE

Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is a technique used in computer networking to find ways for two computers to talk to each other as directly as possible in peer-to-peer networking. It's a standard method of NAT traversal used in WebRTC.

ICE collects all available candidates such as local IP addresses, reflexive addresses-STUN server and relayed addresses-TURN server. All the collected addresses are then sent to the remote peer through Session Description Protocol (SDP).

Once the WebRTC Client has all the collected ICE addresses of itself and its peer, it starts initiating connectivity checks. These checks essentially try sending media over the various addresses until success.

Local Media

To stream media in a video conference, you need to produce audio and video. The audio and video produced and sent by the current user are called local media.

Matroska Container

The Matroska Container is a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. It's a universal format for storing common multimedia content. Matroska is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4, or Advanced Systems Format (ASF), but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open-source software. Matroska file extensions are .mkv for video and .mka for audio-only files.

Mux

'Mux' is short for multiplexing. Multiplexing is the process where multiple recordings are combined into a single file.

Opus

Opus is an audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet but is also intended for storage and streaming applications.

Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bitrate narrowband speech to very high-quality stereo music.

Remote Media

In a video conference, the audio and video produced and sent by other participants is called remote media.

Tail Length

The tail length of an AEC is the length of time over which it can cancel echoes.

TLS 1.2

Transport Layer Security (TLS), the successor of the now-deprecated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. TLS 1.2 is more secure than the previous cryptographic protocols such as SSL 2.0, SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1. Essentially, TLS 1.2 keeps data being transferred across the network more secure.

User

A user is associated with a given person by their identity.

VP8

VP8 is a video compression format that supports progressive scan video signals with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling and 8 bits per sample.

VP9

VP9 is a video coding format that is a successor to VP8. VP9 is customized for video resolutions greater than 1080p (such as UHD) and also enables lossless compression.