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Video meetings and conferences

A video meeting on Orbit is a scheduled room — a persistent, named room on the Orbit Media stack that exists before anyone joins and outlives any single session. A scheduled room is built for groups, not a single peer-to-peer call: it carries a host, a capacity, a guest link, and an inbox entry, and it survives a hang-up so people can rejoin or a recording can live on. Reach for a scheduled room when you want a meeting — a standup, a sales call, a webinar, a training session — rather than a single peer-to-peer video.

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Two ways to run a meeting

The dashboard is the fastest path: open Rooms, name the room, optionally set a time and capacity, and share the invite link. Use the API when the meeting must be created from your own product or scheduled on a recurrence.

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Create a meeting

Give the room a name — that is the label your guests and your inbox will use. Set scheduled_at to put it at a time, or leave it unset to start it now. max_participants caps the room from 2 up to 300; omit it to inherit your tenant’s participant ceiling.
The response returns the room plus a host_token for the creator, so you can join right away without a second call. It also creates an inbox conversation for the room.
A meeting that repeats — a daily standup, a weekly sync — is one scheduled room with a recurrence_rule (an RFC 5545 RRULE value) rather than separate rooms per occurrence. The calendar invite guests receive then carries the full series, so it lands correctly in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook.

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Bring people in, at the right permission level

Get a person in one of two ways. For a guest, mint an invite link and send it; they open the link, redeem it, and are placed in the room with no account and nothing to install. For someone whose meeting you own, call POST /video/rooms-scheduled/:id/join to mint a per-participant token. Whenever you join a participant, decide their permission tier rather than assuming everyone is the same. The tier maps to what they may publish and see:
  • host — full control; mute, spotlight, lock, and remove participants.
  • panelist — can publish audio, video, and screen share; the working default for meeting attendees.
  • viewer — can watch and hear but publish nothing.
  • hidden_supervisor — joins silently for compliance listen-in; publishes and is listed nowhere.
The default role on a join is participant, so a guest cannot promote themselves to host over the wire — host is only granted explicitly by an operator or by the room creator’s own path.
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string
default:"panelist"
Set per joiner. viewer is right for an audience, panelist for a working attendee, and host only for a meeting moderator.

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Capacity and recording behave like a meeting, not a one-off call

max_participants is a real participant ceiling (2–300), not a dialer fan-out limit. Recording decisions are first-class: turn recording on at create with recording_enabled, start and stop it on the live room, and exclude an individual participant from the artifact if they ask not to be recorded. Because a join can carry allow_recording: false, a participant can opt out before their media ever lands in an egress. When an operator needs the meeting to end at a fixed bound, max_duration_minutes opts in a hard auto-end — useful for rooms left open accidentally.
If a join returns 503 SERVICE_UNAVAILABLE, Orbit Media is not configured on your cluster — every video meeting endpoint depends on it. Check the cluster configuration and retry; do not fall back to the one-to-one voice flow as a substitute.

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Search your meeting catalog

Once your tenant accumulates rooms, finding a specific meeting becomes a lookup problem rather than a creation problem. The rooms list — the same GET /video/rooms-scheduled index the dashboard Rooms page renders — accepts a keyword query parameter that filters the returned rooms by case-insensitive substring match against the room name and its room_sid (the internal room identifier, useful when you have an Orbit Media-side reference).
  • keyword — 1 to 120 characters. LIKE/ILIKE metacharacters (%, _, \) are treated as literal text, so guests cannot widen the match with wildcards.
  • status — still applies, so combine keyword with scheduled/live/ended to search only the relevant slice.
  • limit — the page size; defaults to 100, maximum 500.
The search is tenant-scoped: results are always rooms in your own tenant, never another tenant’s. On the dashboard, the Rooms page’s search field sends the same keyword parameter — the list refreshes as you type, so you can jump to a room’s join page or copy its invite link without scrolling through history.
The keyword filter matches on the room name and room_sid, not on the transcript content or participant list. To search what was actually said during a meeting, query the room’s transcript endpoint (GET /video/rooms-scheduled/:id/transcripts) and search client-side.

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Meeting URLs on the list projection

Every room returned by the list route carries a meeting_url field — a relative join path (e.g. /join/meeting/weekly-sales-sync) that resolves against your dashboard origin. The dashboard uses this field for the Share and open-actions on the Rooms page, and a workspace’s own links can safely copy it without reconstructing the public join route. Combine it with your current origin and locale, or use the returned path directly when both are relative to the same dashboard host.

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Where to go next

  • Room access tokens — what an access token grants and exactly where to pass it to connect over WebRTC.
  • Video API reference — the full scheduled-room endpoint surface, including recording, moderation, and simulive.