2025 has just begun, so it’s the perfect time to look back at the highlights of Software Mansion’s multimedia and AI teams over the past year.

Let’s be honest, 2024 wasn’t exactly smooth sailing — for us or the industry as a whole — but we managed to weather the storm and deliver some remarkable releases. Throughout the year, we shared detailed documentation and blog posts about specific launches, so in this article, I’d like to focus on the milestones and events that truly broadened our tech horizons. Without further ado, let’s dive into our 2024 wrap-up.

Q1: Launching Elixir WebRTC 0.1.0 & Exploring Video Inpainting Possibilities at ML Prague

We couldn’t imagine a better start to 2024 than the foundational release of Elixir WebRTC 0.1.0. It all began in the second half of 2023, when we set a clear goal and started working hard to achieve it: to create a standards-compliant WebRTC implementation in pure Elixir with a clean API, comprehensive documentation, and seamless integration with the broader Elixir ecosystem, i.e., the Phoenix framework. You might wonder if we succeeded. Well, building a Twitch clone in pure Elixir is now easier than ever, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves — there are still a couple of months to cover. If you want to learn more about our Elixir WebRTC journey, we have a detailed post on that.

When spring had sprung, we headed to ML Prague, a conference focused on machine learning. At our stand, we showcased the real-time video inpainting demo, which turned out to be much more popular than we had anticipated. I won’t dive too deep into the details of this software here, but for those interested, be sure to check out our article and take a look at the photo below. It was very exciting to see people’s reactions as they realized the bottles they were holding in their hands had just magically disappeared on the live stream they were watching on the screen. Now, imagine us doing this trick with real-time video while keeping the latency below 500ms!

Q2: Advancing Multimedia Technologies & Expanding Our Tech Stack

Even though May is one of the most beautiful months in Kraków, our team was already craving some summer vibes. So, we headed to Naples to attend Janus Con and enjoy a few extra perks like delicious Italian pizza and plenty of sunshine. Another reason for our trip was the launch of Live Compositor 0.1.0 — the big project we’ve been working on for several months. Live Compositor is a media server for low-latency, programmable video and audio compositing in real-time applications. It provides a declarative API, which means no more plumbing crazy FFmpeg commands. Plus, it simplifies mixing live streams, leveraging Rust for speed and WebGPU for flexibility. You can learn more about it here.

But that’s not the end — just before we headed off for a much-needed summer break, we were excited to share two big projects with the world: the ExVision library and the announcement of Fishjam.

We created ExVision because we saw the need for a tool that connects computer vision and AI to the Elixir ecosystem, making it possible to run inference with just a couple of lines of code.

Fishjam, on the other hand, is a fully managed platform as a service designed to simplify the development and deployment of real-time communication apps, especially for React Native and React applications. In a nutshell, they both match our mission: taking the heavy lifting out of the equation.

Q3: Organizing the 2nd Edition of RTC.ON

September brought us the second edition of the RTC.ON conference, and let me tell you — what a conference it was! Two days packed with talks from top-notch experts from the RTC and AI community, delivered in our (not gonna lie) stunning office in Kraków. If you missed it, we’ve put together a YouTube playlist with all the talks, so you can catch up while cozying up with a cup of warm tea or coffee. And let’s not forget the social interactions — the RTC community is really growing, and it’s a pleasure to watch it unfold.

​​But RTC.ON wasn’t the only highlight of early fall 2024 — we also launched the initial version of Boombox, a straightforward streaming library built on top of Membrane. With Boombox creating complex multimedia pipelines, streaming multimedia using various protocols and formats such as WebRTC, RTMP, RTSP, HLS, or MP4 gets easier, more enjoyable, and more efficient — a trio that lies at the core of what we do at Software Mansion. If you’re keen to learn more about Boombox’s capabilities, check out the article we published a while back.

Q4: Organizing Elixir Stream Week for the 1st Time & Wrapping Up 2024 with Pioneering Mobile AI Library

The dust from the onsite RTC.ON conference had barely settled when we decided to run another community initiative — Elixir Stream Week, five days of streams by five top Elixir devs. All broadcasted using Elixir WebRTC, a batteries-included WebRTC implementation for the Elixir ecosystem we’ve been developing for some time now. Hundreds of viewers, great Q&A, a bit of stress, and a few technical challenges (BTW, we wrote an in-depth article on the behind-the-scenes), but it was all worth the effort in the end. Plus, everyone got to see that it’s possible to build a Twitch clone using Elixir WebRTC in just an hour. We’ve got a YouTube playlist of these broadcasts as well, so you can still catch up.

Late fall in Poland isn’t typically the season when many things come to fruition, but we always strive to make the impossible possible. In 2024, we finally launched the React Native ExecuTorch library which allows developers to execute AI models, including LLMs, with just a few lines of JavaScript. It not only streamlines the process by removing the need for native code expertise but also reduces costs by cutting out cloud dependencies.

In just two months, we rolled out two releases, providing users with both LLM and computer vision capabilities to run inference on mobile devices. Secure, cheaper, greener. Is there a better way to wrap up an intense year?

Looking Forward to 2025

With the benefit of hindsight, I can truly appreciate all the great work we put out there in recent months, the connections we’ve made, the inspiring conversations we had, and the relationships we built that I’m confident will stand the test of time.

A huge thank you to everyone who helped make 2024 a landmark year! That said, I don’t want to get too sentimental — there’s still plenty of work ahead.

2025 — we’re coming in strong, and looking at our roadmap, I can already tell this year is going to be a fire one too, so stay tuned!

If you’d like to keep up with our work, we’re doing a monthly newsletter dedicated to all things multimedia, streaming, and WebRTC. One email per month, no spam included. See previous editions and sign up here.

And if you need some help with a product that’s related to Elixir, WebRTC, or multimedia, we can work on it together! Drop us an email at [email protected], or fill in our contact form and tell us what we can help with.