A Media Engine is a piece of software that handles media processing.
In the case of VoIP and WebRTC, this boils down to taking care of the following set of tasks:
- Integrating with voice (and video) codecs
- Integrating with peripherals and devices, such as microphone, camera, speaker and display
- Dealing with network related problems such as packet loss, packet reordering and jitter
- Handling acoustic echo
- Optimizing media quality by way of heuristic algorithms such as noise reduction (both voice and video)
- Implementing network transport proocols, such as RTP
WebRTC is a Media Engine with a standardized Java Script API that is embedded in a web browser.