We’ve been hearing from developers that our Dolby.io real-time audio and video communications capabilities are steadily improving with each release. Our 3.1 release is the latest example of delivering some of those important capabilities. In addition to addressing some of the more pressing issues reported to our teams, we’d like to highlight a few new features:
- Developer control over video forwarding
- Fine-grained access control for conference capabilities
- Better guides to help with notifications and recordings
You can learn more about the 3.1 features in the release notes for the Client SDK and REST APIs but let’s look at a few examples of what you can do below.
Combined with our Dolby Voice capability, these are some of the reasons we were recently recognized for innovations in communications at the 2021 DEVIES Awards.
Developer Control Over Video Forwarding
Video Forwarding allows you to create client applications that give users control to dynamically adjust the number of transmitted video streams they receive. This can be useful for supporting things like:
- low bandwidth mode for mobility
- screenshare prioritization
- battery saver for underpowered mobile devices
- pinned speaker view such as the last n active speakers
- audio only mode
Features you may be familiar with such as simulcast are handled by the platform to optimize for network conditions and device capabilities. With Video Forwarding, control is given to the application developer to further customize this behavior based on the use case and desired outcome.
For a web application, a call to the videoForwarding method can be used to set a limit on number of participants as well as the order in which to prioritize who is pinned to always be visible:
VoxeetSDK.conference.videoForwarding({
max: 4,
participants: [{externalId: 123}, {externalId: 456}, ...]
})See the Video Forwarding guide for more information about the available parameters along with iOS and Android examples.
Conference Access Control
As you may be familiar, authentication merely confirms that a user (or app) is who they say they are. When we want to control what resources a person has access to or permissions an application should have — we need authorizations. The Enhanced Conference Access Control gives you this capability for your projects.
You can use a conference access token to configure permissions for finer level of access control to specify who:
- can invite participants to a conference
- join a conference
- kick others from a conference
- record a conference
- send audio, messages, and video streams
- share screen, video, or files
With a protected conference you can help insure privacy and a better experience for your users.
To get started with this feature look for “Enhanced Conference Access Control” from your account dashboard. Then review the Enhanced Conference Access Control guide for more details on how to use this capability.
Better Guides
We’ve been working to answer some of the most important questions in building applications by publishing some new technical guides. We’re just getting started but check them out:
The Dolby.io team hopes you find some of these features useful and look forward to seeing what you build next.
