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Is there any limit for number of participants in a room of group type in Twilio Video API? In the documentation is specified a limit for peer-to-peer type but said nothing about group type rooms.

UPDATE: Twilio mentioned limit for 50 participants per room in the article in their blog. It looks like a very small number. Is it still the same?

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/05/announcing-programmable-video-group-rooms.html

boxx
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1 Answers1

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Twilio developer evangelist here.

The maximum number of participants in a group room in Twilio Video is 50. In a peer to peer room, it is 10.

Twilio Video is intended for group chats, not for broadcasting or other one to many use cases.

When you use a peer to peer room in Twilio Video, each peer has to send their media stream to each other peer in the room and receive streams from all other peers. This is why the limit is just 10.

When you use a group room in Twilio Video, each participant sends their stream to a central server that mixes the video of all the participants and sends one stream back. In this case, the server needs to do more work as each participant joins, the maximum is 50.

philnash
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    So, if I need to broadcast a Twilio room (peer-to-peer or group room) to thousands, what would be the best way to do it? Somehow feed that WebRTC stream to a streaming service like Wowza to then stream via RTMP or HLS? Or is there a better way? – Iraklis Alexopoulos Mar 21 '20 at 14:25
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    I haven't done anything like that before, but yes, you would need to take the WebRTC media stream somehow and turn it into a an RTMP stream. That's all I know though, sorry. – philnash Mar 23 '20 at 04:04
  • This is a bummer. As I've read WebRTC can support up to 1000 participants. 50 is so few. – evolross Aug 16 '20 at 08:36
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    @evolross WebRTC itself is a peer to peer technology. Each WebRTC connection is direct between peers. Theoretically you can have many peers, but you are bound by the bandwidth and CPU of each of the participants. Twilio Video group rooms makes a Twilio server the peer that each participant connects to, but Twilio is still bound by CPU processing the incoming streams of each participant and forwarding them on. 50 is our current limit (though you may still find devices struggle to receive 49 other participant streams. I would be interested where you got 1000 from. – philnash Aug 16 '20 at 23:43
  • Is it possible to take feed and broadcast from twillio? Any simple way to acive this from twillio api ? – Yuvaraj V Oct 14 '20 at 03:07
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    @Yuvaraj Some people have done this by joining the Video Room with a headless browser, capturing the videos from the participants and then streaming those to a server that then broadcasts out using a tool like [Wowza](https://www.wowza.com/). I don't have more detail than that though. – philnash Oct 14 '20 at 04:06
  • @philnash I tried to capturing the video from the participants. I'm using Twilio how to capture remoteStream and send it to Wowza if some people have done can you please share some URL for same. We're looking for solution of to prevent limit of 50 participant. – Gunjan Patel Dec 15 '20 at 03:25
  • @Yuvaraj Did you get found or developed something please share over here would be great help to community who is looking for same solution. – Gunjan Patel Dec 15 '20 at 03:28
  • [This is an (old) example of capturing video from Twilio Video participants using a ghost participant inside headless Chrome](https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video.js-recording-bot) and then passing it to a server to record. Using the principles in that application, you could capture the streams and instead of recording, stream them to Wowza. I can't help further than that though, sorry. – philnash Dec 15 '20 at 03:29