Current issues with Licode

[kaustavdm]

This list is not exhaustive yet.

1. The signalling and media server plane are very tightly coupled. You cannot use Licode only for the media server part. Take a look at the dependencies between Erizo Controller, Erizo API and Erizo.
2. Licode has its own set of authentication measures. The Nuve API acts as the controller for managing Erizo. This means, whatever tech stack we use, we have to mask Licode's authentication system in order to let clients connect to it. And that is what Conqueror does currently.
3. Licode does not mix media streams. Even though initially I had thought that Licode actually mixes streams, it does not. It simply creates that many RTCPeerConnection and pipes media streams for all of them. While this is great for one-to-one scenarios, the bandwidth required on the client-side for one user is proportional to the number of active users in the call (room). This means, there will be high bandwidth chokes on the client-side for multi-party calls, especially, for video streaming.
4. Horizontally scaling Licode needs to hack Licode. The only to way Licode scale horizontally at the moment is to run RabbitMQ, Mongo and Erizo on globally available boxes and deploy as many ErizoAgents as needed on separate boxes. Then, multiple ErizoControllers need to deployed and load-balanced with Nginx. Even then, given the tight coupling between all the Erizo components, the process of doing this setup will be highly complex, and will need us to manually decouple all the parts.
5. ErizoClient has its own set of browser abstractions. It tries to abstract out browser differences, but ends up with creating multiple forks. End result: what may work with their changes on Firefox 38 may break everything for Firefox 37 and below, and there is no way currently to bridge that gap. In existing architecture, we'll need to add another stack for Firefox 37 and below and add specific code there. ErizoClient also comes with its own logger interfaces, bringing in additional bloat. It even loads its own media player, which is hidden in Grouphone using display: none in the parent element :-P Ref issue.
6. Licode has known issues with video streaming. It ranges from poor handling of video streams to high bandwidth consumption on the client side. Take a quick look at some video related threads in Licode's user forum.