Fundamentals
Basics
The eyeson API organizes meetings within a group-like structure using rooms. If you start a meeting for a room with a specific identifier, all users of this identifier will end up in the same meeting. For sure you can run as many meetings using different rooms as you want but double-check your plan terms for certain limitations. Additionally to the identifier (id), you can set any readable name you want. This value is for display only and serves as the meeting title.
The only required information to start a meeting is the participant’s name that is going to join. For sure this can be any name, must not be unique and can be a pseudonym as well. In this primary action if not provided eyeson will generate a user identifier and a room identifier for you. The participant will join the current meeting of this room, however, to add others remember to store and reuse the identifier or else your user is limited to invite others from within the meeting.
In case you need any kind of scheduling or invitation you can easily handle this in your platform, without any dependencies so far. This gives you the power to do any authentication and authorization in your software and only start a meeting when you are ready. Please note that we do expire the access to a meeting after a short time so make sure your participant is ready to join.
We love to build state of the art software, therefore eyeson uses the latest technologies and is highly scalable. We do provide you with a meeting in seconds, no need to schedule anything upfront at eyeson. As soon as your user wants to participate or start a meeting, call the eyeson API to retrieve the access key on-the-fly and forward the user to the proper UI.
Guest token for in-meeting invites
For every meeting, we also provide a guest access token. This does allow participants to invite others to the current session. To distinguish users from the ones that did authenticate with your application a certain flag (guest) is set. For sure you can disable guest token generation when starting a meeting.
When using the guest link a form is presented to enter the participant’s name to display. On submission, a new user will get created on-the-fly for the current session and the participant can join seamlessly.
The default web GUI
The eyeson web UI is fully packed with features and optimized for a great user experience. However, you might want to create your own look and feel at some point. This can be easily done as we provide a convenient JavaScript package to help you build a product that fits all your needs.
For iOS and Android we also provide the eyeson mobile applications found in PlayStore and Apple Store. Once installed meeting URLs to the default web UI will be used to join meetings using the app.
Layouts, layers & language
Using layouts you can choose to place one, two or four participants on custom positions in the video or to switch back to auto-mode. Note that this will deactivate SFU mode if it has not been disabled beforehand.
Besides the advantages of low bandwidth usage and a video presentation that is the same for all participants, the eyeson single stream technology also allows injecting media like images and video. You can use background and foreground images that directly goes into the video stream. All participants will see the same video stream, the same as shown in broadcasts or being recorded.
On demand, the default web UI can be used in German as well as in some community translated languages. For sure you can add languages, simply by creating a pull request at GitHub.