aiortc is a library for Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) and
Object Real-Time Communication (ORTC) in Python. It is built on top of
asyncio, Python's standard asynchronous I/O framework.
The API closely follows its Javascript counterpart while using pythonic constructs:
- promises are replaced by coroutines
- events are emitted using
pyee.EventEmitter
To learn more about aiortc please read the documentation.
The main WebRTC and ORTC implementations are either built into web browsers, or come in the form of native code. While they are extensively battle tested, their internals are complex and they do not provide Python bindings. Furthermore they are tightly coupled to a media stack, making it hard to plug in audio or video processing algorithms.
In contrast, the aiortc implementation is fairly simple and readable. As
such it is a good starting point for programmers wishing to understand how
WebRTC works or tinker with its internals. It is also easy to create innovative
products by leveraging the extensive modules available in the Python ecosystem.
For instance you can build a full server handling both signaling and data
channels or apply computer vision algorithms to video frames using OpenCV.
Furthermore, a lot of effort has gone into writing an extensive test suite for
the aiortc code to ensure best-in-class code quality.
aiortc allows you to exchange audio, video and data channels and
interoperability is regularly tested against both Chrome and Firefox. Here are
some of its features:
- SDP generation / parsing
- Interactive Connectivity Establishment, including half-trickle
- DTLS key and certificate generation
- DTLS handshake, encryption / decryption (for SCTP)
- SRTP keying, encryption and decryption for RTP and RTCP
- Pure Python SCTP implementation
- Data Channels
- Sending and receiving audio (Opus / PCMU / PCMA)
- Sending and receiving video (VP8 / H.264)
- Bundling audio / video / data channels
- RTCP reports, including NACK / PLI to recover from packet loss
In addition to aiortc's Python dependencies you need a couple of libraries installed on your system for media codecs. FFmpeg 3.2 or greater is required.
On Debian/Ubuntu run:
apt install libavdevice-dev libavfilter-dev libopus-dev libvpx-dev pkg-configOn OS X run:
brew install ffmpeg opus libvpx pkg-configaiortc is released under the BSD license.