Kurento: The Swiss Army Knife of WebRTC Media Servers

In this article we introduce Kurento, an open source WebRTC media server and a set of client APIs intended to simplify the development of applications with rich media capabilities for the Web and smartphone platforms. Kurento features include group communications, transcoding, recording, mixing, broadcasting and routing of audiovisual flows, but also provides advanced media processing capabilities such as computer vision and augmented reality. It is based on a modular architecture, which makes it possible for developers to extend and customize its native capabilities with third-party media processing algorithms. Thanks to all of this, Kurento can be a powerful tool for Web developers who may find natural programming with its Java and JavaScript APIs following the traditional three-tiered Web development model.