Future of Windows support (what is your use case?)

mediasoup libraries
1

I’m wondering why people use mediasoup on Windows and how popular that is.

First of all, it doesn’t seem like there is anyone actively maintaining Windows support in mediasoup, there is still no CI for Windows (again because no one contributed it), which makes it impossible to catch Windows-specific issues like there was recently with OpenSSL.

I’m currently working on replacing GYP with Meson and faced some Windows-specific errors that I’m not sure how to overcome.

So question to those who use mediasoup on Windows: why are you using it natively on Windows instead of running under WSL and would it be a deal breaker for you if said support will potentially stop at some hypothetical future release?

2

I assume that having mediasoup work in Windows is good for local development and testing. But… other than that? I’d also like to hear some responses about this.

3

I’m not fully sure how to use it with Windows. :smiley:
I favor it though for those who use the operating system for most of their daily tasks.

4

We have a mixed set of development with both windows and Mac.

On our windows machines, we weren’t able to run media soup natively, as the build kept on crashing. we resorted to running the media soup server on docker, with alpine linux. Mac machines had no issue running the system natively.

For production we are using ubuntu and it is running fantastically,

5

Did you have required software installed on Windows?: mediasoup :: Installation
If so, it is worth creating a thread on the forum about it, since it is supposed to work.

6

I haven’t looked at it for a while, as we’ve been doing lots of other work at the moment, and our media soup instances have been absolutely rock solid, so very little extra dev has been needed on them.

I can give it another try as some point in the future, and see what issues we are having, if I remember rightly it was to do with vs2017 vs 2019 binaries and msbuild being in different places…

7

for local development / testing on my windows machine I run mediasoup inside WSL2 ( Windows Subsystem for Linux)

8

So that’s like running mediasoup in Linux and not in Windows, am I right?

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9

Not sure if this helps, I could never use it on Windows natively without use of WSL. Have tried different versions of Python as I believe I got an error there at one point and MSBuild; no luck but no deep-diving either.

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I’d love for window support out the box, but not sure how possible that is, or how others would do it outside WSL.

10

that is correct - it works for me as I can spin up my mediasoup server locally within the sub system and connect to it from windows where I do most of my development. I honestly do not see the advantage of having a windows build of mediasoup … even windows server 2019 supports wsl2 … but that’s just me :slight_smile:

11

In my former company we deployed a mediasoup (v3.5.9) based application on a Windows Server 2012 Machine. It ran purely on Windows, no WSL or VM

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12

interestingly enough, I just tried building for windows and got it to build successfully.
If I get it to run, I will make a video outlining the steps

13

By the way, the lowest version that allows to run mediasoup out of the box is Windows 8 now. Not because of mediasoup code itself, but because libuv developers dropped support of Windows 7. They had formally done that some time ago, but recently they actually started to use a function from WinAPI that appeared only in Windows 8 (namely, GetHostNameW). So, in Windows 7, the workers will not start. It is still possible to patch the libuv sources in case someone want to run mediasoup in Windows 7.

14

That is interesting, though Windows 7 is EOL for over a year at this point, so not like it matters a lot in practice.