Jicofo

Jicofo, short for Jitsi Conference Focus, is a central signaling component in the Jitsi Meet open source project. It acts as the conference focus, coordinating the setup and management of multi-user video conferences and handling the signaling between clients and the media infrastructure.

Jicofo runs as a Java process and connects to the XMPP server (Prosody) as a component. It authenticates with a shared secret and uses XMPP to receive room and participant events from clients. It communicates with the Jitsi Videobridge (JVB) using the Colibri protocol to allocate and control media resources for each participant, creating video channels on the selected bridge and updating them as the conference evolves. Jicofo also handles bridge selection, typically choosing a bridge based on load and availability.

In operation, Jicofo maintains the conference state, grants focus and moderator rights, and responds to changes such as participants joining, leaving, or muting. It orchestrates interactions between clients and the videobridge, and can coordinate with additional components such as Jigasi for SIP integration or recording services when configured, though it delegates media handling to the videobridge.

Deployment and ecosystem: Jicofo is part of the Jitsi Meet stack and is typically deployed together with Prosody (the XMPP server) and Jitsi Videobridge on a server or cluster. It is open-source software released under a permissive license, commonly used in both small-scale and large-scale deployments. Jicofo’s design emphasizes modular signaling and scalability, allowing multiple instances to support larger conferences with appropriate load balancing and bridge resources.