Kurento FAQ

This is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about Kurento. Feel free to suggest new entries or different wording for answers!

How do I...

...install Kurento Media Server in an Amazon EC2 instance?

If you are installing Kurento in a NAT environment (i.e. in any cloud provider), you’ll need to provide a STUN server configuration in /etc/kurento/modules/kurento/WebRtcEndpoint.conf.ini. Apart from that, you will have to open all UDP ports in your security group, as STUN will use any port available from the whole 0-65535 range.

Though for most situations it’s enough to configure a STUN server in the KMS configuration files, you might need to install a TURN server, for example coturn. Here are some instructions on how to install this TURN server for Kurento:

1. Download the package from the project’s page.

2. Extract the contents. You should have a INSTALL file with instructions, and a .deb package. Follow the instructions to install the package.

3. Once the package is installed, you’ll need to modify the startup script in /etc/init.d/coturn.

  • Add the external and local IPs as vars:

    EXTERNAL_IP=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4)
LOCAL_IP=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4)

  • Modify the DAEMON_ARGS var to take these IPs into account, along with the long-term credentials user and password (kurento:kurento in this case, but could be different), realm and some other options:

    DAEMON_ARGS="-c /etc/turnserver.conf -f -o -a -v -r kurento.org
-u kurento:kurento --no-stdout-log --external-ip $EXTERNAL_IP/$LOCAL_IP"

4. Then let’s enable the turnserver to run as an automatic service daemon. For this, open the file /etc/default/coturn and uncomment the key:

TURNSERVER_ENABLED=1

5. Now, you have to tell the Kurento server where is the turnserver installed. For this, modify the turnURL key in /etc/kurento/modules/kurento/WebRtcEndpoint.conf.ini:

turnURL=kurento:kurento@<public-ip>:3478
stunServerAddress=<public-ip>
stunServerPort=3478

The following ports should be open in the firewall:

  • 3478 TCP & UDP
  • 49152 - 65535 UDP: As per RFC 5766, these are the ports that the TURN server will use to exchange media. These ports can be changed using the --max-port and --min-port options from the turnserver.

注解

While the RFC specifies the ports used by TURN, if you are using STUN you will need to open all UDP ports, as those ports are not constrained.

6. The last thing to do, is to start the coturn server and the media server:

sudo service coturn start && sudo service kurento-media-server-6.0 restart

注解

Please do make sure you check your installation using this test application

...know how many Media Pipelines do I need for my Application?

Media Elements can only communicate with each other when they are part of the same pipeline. Different MediaPipelines in the server are independent do not share audio, video, data or events.

A good heuristic is that you will need one pipeline per each set of communicating partners in a channel, and one Endpoint in this pipeline per audio/video streams reaching a partner.

...know how many Endpoints do I need?

Your application will need to create an Endpoint for each media stream flowing to (or from) the pipeline. As we said in the previous answer, each set of communicating partners in a channel will be in the same Media Pipeline, and each of them will use one or more Endpoints. They could use more than one if they are recording or reproducing several streams.

...know to what client a given WebRtcEndPoint belongs or where is it coming from?

Kurento API currently offers no way to get application attributes stored in a Media Element. However, the application developer can maintain a hashmap or equivalent data structure mapping the WebRtcEndpoint internal Id (which is a string) to whatever application information is desired.

Why do I get the error...

...”Cannot create gstreamer element”?

This is a typical error which happens when you update Kurento Media Server from version 4 to 5. The problem is related to the GStreamer dependency version. The solution is the following:

sudo apt-get remove kurento*
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install kurento-media-server-6.0