Building a Real-Time Audio/Video Live Streaming Project with WebRTC and Swoole

With the growing popularity of audio/video live streaming, this article demonstrates how to build a practical live streaming project using WebRTC for real‑time media and Swoole as a high‑performance PHP WebSocket server.

1. Set up the Swoole server – install the Swoole extension and create a WebSocket server listening on port 9501. Example code:

$server = new swoole_websocket_server("0.0.0.0", 9501);
$server->on("open", function (swoole_websocket_server $server, $request) {
    echo "client ".$request->fd." connected\n";
});
$server->on("message", function (swoole_websocket_server $server, $frame) {
    echo "received message: ".$frame->data."\n";
    $server->push($frame->fd, "hello");
});
$server->on("close", function (swoole_websocket_server $server, $fd) {
    echo "client {$fd} closed\n";
});
$server->start();

2. WebRTC real‑time audio/video communication – use the browser’s getUserMedia API to capture media and send it through the WebSocket connection. Example JavaScript:

navigator.getUserMedia({audio: true, video: true}, function(stream) {
    var video = document.querySelector('video');
    video.srcObject = stream;
}, function(error) {
    console.error(error);
});

3. Video segmenting – to ensure smooth transmission, split the stream into HLS fragments with FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -c:a aac -f hls -hls_time 5 -hls_list_size 0 output.m3u8

The article then combines the server code, client JavaScript, and FFmpeg command to achieve a complete live‑streaming solution and provides a link to a paid Swoole‑WebRTC course for further learning.