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Automatically ending a conference

You may want to ensure that conferences are automatically terminated in certain situations, in order to preserve resources and to ensure that certain types of participants can't keep the conference alive by remaining in a call indefinitely. For this reason, there are settings that allow you to end a conference in any of the following situations:

These settings are all independent; a conference needs to meet only one of the above criteria in order for it to be terminated automatically on that basis. For example, you may have configured your system to terminate conferences 120 seconds after the last Host leaves, and 60 seconds after there is only one participant remaining. In that case:

  • if all but one Guest remains in a conference 30 seconds after the last Hosts has left, the conference will be terminated 60 seconds later (i.e. based on the one participant remaining setting)
  • if all but two guests remain 30 seconds after the last Host has left, the conference will be terminated in another 90 seconds (i.e. based on the last Host setting).

When only guests remain

Pexip Infinity will always terminate a conference a certain period after the last Host* disconnects and only Guests remain in the call. By default this period is set to one minute, but it can be set to between 0 seconds (i.e. all Guests are disconnected immediately upon the last Host disconnecting), and one day.

The default is 60 seconds. This should be sufficient time for a Host who has been unintentionally disconnected from a conference to reconnect before the conference is terminated.

* For the purposes of this setting, in order to keep the conference alive a Host must have either joined with audio or video, or joined as control-only and elected to Start conference. Other control-only Hosts will not keep the conference alive.

To change this setting, go to Platform configuration > Global settings > Guests-only timeout.

When there is only one participant remaining in the conference

You can configure the length of time (in seconds) for which a conference will continue with only one participant remaining. This can be set to between 60 seconds and one day, or alternatively you can set it to 0 which means that a conference will never be terminated on the basis that there is a single participant remaining. The default is 0.

When this setting is used to terminate a conference, the type of participant (Host, Guest, ADP, administrator-added, streaming, etc.) is irrelevant; if they are the only participant remaining, the conference will be terminated after the specified time.

To change this setting, go to Platform configuration > Global settings > Last participant backstop timeout.

When the only participants remaining are ADPs and/or administrator-added

In most cases a conference won't be terminated if a Host participant is present. However, if the only remaining Host participants are:

  • Automatically Dialed Participants (ADPs), and/or
  • participants who have been added to a conference by an administrator (either from the Administrator interface or using the Management API),

then the conference may or may not be terminated, depending on the participants' Keep conference alive settings and whether any other ADPs or administrator-added participants remain in the conference.

Keeping a conference alive

There are three options for the Keep conference alive setting:

  • Yes: if the participant is a Host, the conference will continue to run even when this is the only participant remaining - in other words, they are just like any other Host participant. This is the default used when adding a participant to a conference using the Administrator interface or using the Management API.
  • No: the conference will be automatically terminated if this is the only participant remaining. This is the option we recommend for automated systems that are unable to terminate a call themselves, such as streaming participants.
  • If multiple: if two or more ADP or administrator-added participants with the If multiple setting remain in the call and at least one of them is a Host, the conference will not be terminated by Pexip Infinity. However, if all other participants have disconnected and only one ADP or administrator-added participant with the If multiple setting remains, the conference will be terminated by Pexip Infinity. This is to prevent automated systems (such as recording devices) that are unable to terminate a call themselves from keeping the conference alive indefinitely. For this reason, if you are using this option we recommend that each Virtual Meeting Room or Virtual Auditorium has no more than one such automated system as an ADP. A better alternative is to give automated systems a Keep conference alive setting of No (see above).

    If multiple is the default option when adding an ADP.

If the only remaining participants in a conference are ADPs and/or administrator-dialed participants with a mix of Yes, If multiple and No options, the conference will be terminated unless:

  • at least one participant has a Keep conference alive setting of Yes, or
  • there are two or more participants with a setting of If multiple and at least one of them is a Host.

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