At Vonage, we are committed to empowering businesses with innovative communication solutions. The Vonage Video API team recently released a new version of the Vonage Video Client SDK - v2.27. Our latest enhancements to the Client SDK are designed to elevate your user experience, providing you with more tools to create high-quality, reliable video communications.
Call Quality Monitoring: Publisher Audio Fallback
Video Communications channels can be sensitive to changes in the network and limited bandwidth conditions. Maintaining audio quality is arguably one of the most important aspects of 1:1 video sessions, like doctor/patient consultation, where real-time communication heavily relies on clear and uninterrupted audio.
Publisher Audio Fallback, an improved call quality monitoring mechanism, serves as a proactive mechanism to optimize audio quality during challenging network conditions. The feature operates by continuously monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) statistics through the Client SDK. If the observed network conditions fall below the threshold required to sustain both audio and video streams seamlessly, the system triggers publisher audio fallback. The Video API continues to monitor for improved network conditions to support automatic re-enablement of the video stream when network conditions improve enough to support video again.
The publisher audio fallback feature improves call quality by having a publisher switch to audio-only mode when the publishing client's network conditions cannot support video. Client events are dispatched like a network traffic light (Enabled, Warning/WarningLifted, Disabled) to provide feedback to client endpoints. This feature is available on the init.Publisher() properties of all of the web and native 2.27 APIs enhancing our audio fallback with capability now available on both P2P/relay and routed sessions.
VP9 Codec Selection (P2P/Relay)
To continuously promote high-quality video sessions, the 2.27 Client SDK introduces VP9 codec as a preferred video codec selection for P2P/Relay sessions. The VP9 codec is a successor to the WebRTC standard VP8 codec and is now supported by a majority of WebRTC clients. VP9 offers enhanced video compression while maintaining high-quality visual content, which translates into higher-quality video, especially for 1:1 video sessions. The 2.27 Video API clients now support VP9 on P2P/Relay sessions when selected as the preferred codec in the Video API dashboard. For routed sessions, selecting VP9 as the preferred codec will optimize P2P communication with VP9 and fall back to VP8 for multiparty sessions using the media router.
E2E Media Encryption: Native SDKs
Security is always paramount and Vonage has reinforced its commitment to safeguarding your communications. The 2.27 Client SDK comes equipped with enhanced end-to-end encryption, ensuring that your data remains private and secure.
Following the addition of media encryption for routed sessions on JS Web clients in previous releases, we have updated support for End-to-End Encryption APIs to our 2.27 native SDKs: including iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and MacOS. This helps customers who are focused on privacy and security protect their video sessions with an extra layer of security by encrypting the media payload at the client so that it will remain encrypted through the media server when routing media end-to-end to other mobile and desktop native clients.
Subscriber-Side Media Processor
In our previous releases, our client SDKs empowered developers with the ability to utilize Media Processor transformer functionalities on the publisher side. With Client SDK 2.27, we introduce the Media Processor (Subscriber) for the JS Web SDK. By offering subscriber-side media transformations, customers can now tailor their media processing experiences and apply audio or video transformations, such as Noise Suppression or video transformations, directly on the receiving side media for flexibility in processing capabilities.
WebRTC and Security Updates
The client SDK 2.27 release also comes with updates to webrtc libraries and security updates. Specifically, the release includes an update to the libvpx library with a fix for the CVE-2023-5217 vulnerability.
The client SDK release 2.27.0 is already available to Vonage Video API customers running on the standard environment and we plan on releasing it to the Enterprise Environment in early February.
Are you excited about the newest SDK features? Do you think we left something out? Please join us on our Vonage Community Slack or send us a message on X, previously known as Twitter, and let us know how we can help!
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Jon is a Senior Product Manager for Vonage Video API, with over 20 years of communications technology experience as a patent-holding researcher and a product practitioner. A New Jersey native, his favorite part about building APIs is getting to collaborate with customers around the world who implement it to build their unique and creative video solutions.
