Kurento 7.0.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 in a docker

[neilyoung]

Hi folks,

I'm happy to see that my long-admired Kurento Media Server is still alive, despite having been declared dead so many times. I also think it still holds up quite well in terms of stability and feature set. And now there's even version 7.2.0 for Ubuntu 22.04. Great.

I haven’t worked with it in a long time and only got back into it due to a long-standing annoying issue: my production servers kept requiring reboots. The problem was that KMS in the versions I used (6.18 and 7.0) would slowly but steadily "consume" UDP ports that had been allocated for TURN. This was ultimately resolved by configuring Coturn to automatically release stale ports.

Now, for the first time, I've bundled KMS 7.0.1 (built from source), Coturn 4.7, Redis, my signaling app, MediaMTX, and Certbot – all under Ubuntu 20.04 in a Docker container – and it works beautifully.

Only one thing stands out, which I’ve never seen over the years: I mostly work in non-transcoding 1-to-many setups – meaning there's one publisher streaming video into KMS, and one or more subscribers consuming it.

When the connection uses VP8, everything runs smoothly. But when using H.264, I sometimes – not always – observe the following behaviour: the video on the subscriber freezes shortly after playback begins and then resumes. I think an IDR frame is simply missing and only arrives ~5 seconds later.

I just don't yet know how to approach this from a debugging perspective.

Does one have an idea?

@j1elo Hoping you are still watching this. Greetings.