Collaboration Services

The Collaboration Services are free, open-source (GPL) services built on top of the Pipes API. These are maintained by the Pipes Platform developers, and showcase the power of the Pipes API.

Chat

The chat service provides:

  • Multi-channel chat

  • Point-to-point and group-encrypted channels

  • Chat history and archival

  • Auto-export to filesystem (for use with command-line tools / text editors)

  • Full-text history search

Streaming Voice/Video

The streaming media services are built using PJMEDIA, an open-source streaming media library. High-quality codecs are used, providing much better quality than is available on commercial services.

  • Crystal-clear and gracefully degrading Opus 48k audio codec

  • Point-to-point and multi-user conferencing

  • Full multiplexing control for multi-user conferences, allowing for selective muting/routing

  • End-to-end encryption, including pairwise and private group keys

  • Codec control and hardware acceleration, when available

  • Access to connection/bandwidth statistics for all peers, allowing diagnostics of network connection (i.e., audio/video quality) issues

  • Redundant routing: with proper Network configuration, streams are efficiently routed through multiple network paths, so there’s no central point of failure – calls are uninetrrupted even if Nodes that are routing packets lose their connection

  • Ability to use your own A/V codecs and implementation, and use the Collaboration Services for packet routing only (see also “Port Forwarding” below)

File Sharing

  • Broadcast files on the network and exchange them between peers / subgroups

  • Automatic background synchronization of filesystem areas

  • Replication services, providing redundant file storage across selected Nodes in the network

  • Archival services, allowing massive amounts of data to be saved on the Network, and the storage distributed across selected Nodes with available storage resources, accessible on-demand by any Node in the Network

  • Archival Nodes can configure a third-party storage service (e.g., Dropbox) as a data store, and store only encrypted data there – encrypted so that only you can access it, and not the storage provider as well.

  • Zero-knowledge synchronization and archival: encrypted private files can be stored and transferred by Nodes on the network, with no way except for authorized Nodes to see/decrypt the contents

Port Forwarding

The port forwarding service API allows you to create TCP and UDP connections between arbitrary pairs of Nodes on the network. Using this you can support any network service that can work over a LAN: for example VNC / screen sharing, SSH, private webservers, and native shared filesystems (SMB/AFP).