Controlling media capability

Calls consist of three types of media - audio, video, and presentation - each in their own stream. Pexip Infinity allows you to control which types of media can be used for certain calls. This feature allows better resource management and smaller Session Description Protocols (SDPs) when calling out to known audio-only devices.

You can restrict the media capability either on a per-call basis (the call capability) or a per-conference basis (the conference capability), as described below.

Adding a participant to a conference

When dialing out to a participant from within a conference, either manually or automatically, you can choose whether the call is audio-only, main video only, or main video plus presentation. In such cases, the called participant is not allowed to escalate the call (for example, from an audio-only call to video).

Conference-wide limitations

You can apply limits to individual Virtual Meeting Rooms (including scheduled conferences) or Virtual Auditoriums, restricting them to be audio-only, main video only, or main video plus presentation. In such cases, participants calling in to the conference with a higher media capability have their media limited. For example, when a participant dials in over video to an audio-only VMR, their call is placed as audio-only and they are not subsequently allowed to escalate the call.

Using the audio-only setting where appropriate also has the advantage of increasing the overall capacity of your distributed deployment. Each Conferencing Node reserves an extra connection for each Virtual Meeting Rooms and Virtual Auditoriums it is hosting, to use for a backplane should that service become distributed (i.e. hosted on more than one Conferencing Node). By default this connection is equivalent in capacity to an HD call, but if the service is configured as audio-only it is instead equivalent to that of an audio-only call. For further information on capacity and how calls consume resources, see Hardware resource allocation rules.

Virtual Receptions

You can limit the conference capability of a Virtual Reception. Any restrictions are applied to calls while they are accessing the Virtual Reception service (apart from Pexip apps, which do not access a Virtual Reception in the same way as other endpoints). When the call is placed to the destination VMR, the capability of that service will be available instead, but may or may not be used by the endpoint, as follows:

  • Pexip apps making a video call via an audio-only Virtual Reception always join a video-capable VMR with video
  • Pexip apps making an audio-only call via an audio-only Virtual Reception join a video-capable VMR with audio-only initially, but with the option of enabling video.
  • Standards-based endpoints making a video call via an audio-only Virtual Reception always join a video-capable VMR as audio-only initially. Depending on the endpoint, there may be the option to then enable video.

For example, if you limit your Virtual Reception to audio-only, when Alice calls it from her standards-based endpoint she will not receive any video and will only hear the audio prompts. However, when her call is then placed to the destination VMR which has a capability of main video, she will initially join it as audio-only but can elect to send and receive video as well.

Infinity Gateway calls

For calls made using the Distributed Gateway, you can configure the relevant Call Routing Rule to limit the media by selecting an appropriate Call capability setting:

  • You can limit the media capability of the outbound call to audio-only, main video only, or main video plus presentation. For example, if the media capability is set to audio-only and Alice makes a video call to Bob, Bob will not be able to answer with video.

  • You can match the capability of the outbound call to that of the inbound call by using the Same as incoming call option. This means that if, for example, Alice makes an audio-only call to Bob, Bob will not be able to answer with video.

    Note that when using Same as incoming call an audio-only call cannot later be escalated to video.