I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience comparison:
Onboarding:
Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts.
Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality:
Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts.
Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout:
Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens.
Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.
I proposed Zoom vs Jitsi Meet the other day for a virtual hangout with a group of friends. They initially wanted to try Zoom... because of the virtual backgrounds. Yup, that is what they wanted.
It isn't just a gimmick, it is a legit feature when working from home and you don't want everyone to see your messy kitchen or bedroom. Sadly the chrome app version you have to use for ChromeOS doesn't support that feature anyway :(
Confirming that it isn’t a gimmick. I have been working on distributed WFH Teams for the past 5 years now (long before COVID19) and this has been a consistent point of embarrassment and/or trouble with video conferencing. I can’t begin to tell you how many times we have had people that need extra time to prepare for a meeting because of the background. As a manager, I have had lots of personal conversations with employees who legitimately stress out about getting the computer into a place with a good background.
Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.
The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.
(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.
Zoom refuses to allow virtual backgrounds without green screens, on non-Intel CPUs. I have a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 3700U CPU supporting AVX2 I think, but Zoom won't allow me to turn that feature on. I mentioned this in a chat room and people speculated Zoom was paid off by Intel.
That blur looks great. Too bad I have literally never been able to successfully join a Teams call. Every single time we have to fall back to telephone.
That is odd. A large school I work with in the UK rolled out Teams as an emery year measure yesterday. Everyone was happily doing group video chats, no problem.
I think it works fine for people who have accounts set up. But if you get invited to a Teams (or Skype for Business) meeting, you are often required to log in with an account. This is very different from Zoom, which you can participate in without an account.
I have also been sent in infinite loops of download installer, install, now go download installer again.
>cheesy virtual backgrounds or blur real background
Seems like a stock slightly blurred image of a wall or bookshelf would be best option
The problem I have with the stock backgrounds is they impart a non-professional feel to the meeting....do i really want to show I’m mentally ‘sitting on the beach’ or ‘out in space’ while talking about who gets downsized?
I don’t really like Zoom, but I was on a call the other day with 3 other people calling from phones and iPads, all using virtual backgrounds. You don’t need beefy specs to use the feature.
Probably the other poster meant it requires a lot of CPU for you to have a virtual background, not for other people.
It wouldn't make sense for other people using the feature to take any more processing power--I assume the video is encoded and processed the same either way.
I think the OP meant that people using iPad and iPhone to call in also had virtual backgrounds, so concluded that it might not need as much CPU as the GP surmised.
Another poster mentioned though that Zoom required green screens for this feature on non-intel CPU machines.
I used this the other day in the free version. The text over the screen was annoying, and the background effect was rather glitchy, but it was effective at hiding the mess I was too lazy to clean up.
However, as we were using it for work conference, I felt like I was adding some goofiness to the call and didn't like that. I ended up moving the camera to show less mess, and then eventually actually cleaned up my mess.
I use it for a bunch of goofy stuff in meetings to lighten the mood. When I want to be serious, I change the background image to a photo of our office. If you combine it with OBS studio, you can overlay yourself on presentations or videos, which is also very useful.
I'd be far more willing to turn the video on in my calls of people weren't going to see the messy room in the background, and the calls I'm in have an awful lot of blank screens that would be better if people turned on there video for some face-to-face communication. I think it's less non-essential than you might imagine, this is a really well thought-out feature, and probably pretty technically challenging to implement too.
I just looked up virtual background and that is insanely cool and I totally get where your friends are coming from. I've got to give that a shot sometime - the kinds of features people can build are just so cool
> Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Hangouts (now Meet) is better geared towards GSuite orgs where you're already logged into Google since you have to be to access almost all of your other internal company/school resources, including gmail. It also solves the contacts problem since everyone will be in the company directory.
Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mirrored in Chat, but the video conferencing is still weirdly separate from Meet.
It's weirdly hidden but if you go to meet.google.com and make a meeting, others just need the url to join, no faffing about with connecting to other users in gmail. It needs a corporate gmail account to use though.
I'm not sure is deprecated.
If you're free (paid by your own data), Hangout is the 'consumer' version.
Meet is the paid platform, with more business oriented features.
Meet has a setting that lets you choose how to see people. By default, it shows up to 4 people in equal tiles. After that, it puts the talker large and a few people in small tiles to the side.
But there's a layout option in the vertical dots menu that will let you force it back to 4 large tiles. You cannot specify how many tiles, though, it's always 4.
IIRC classic Hangouts doesn't have the option to tile.
Meet (assuming you're on the current UI, which I would presume has been rolled out to everyone by now) can tile, but only up to four videos (excluding yourself, so five participants). Once you go above that, in automatic mode, it'll drop back to the view with a single large video of a person currently speaking, and smaller videos of everyone else on the side, and, if you force it into the grid view, only four are displayed at a time.
That's the disheartening part. Most hadn't used Hangouts before, one person suggested it due to social distancing, ~1hr into Hangouts call as we're struggling to add another member I introduce Jitsi and paste a link into the group chat. Used for ~15 minutes, then dropped and the manual invite process for hangouts began again - organizer couldn't find the option to generate a sharable link to a Hangouts call (it does exist).
Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is awesome for a family/group of friends with iDevices.
Depends on how you are defining "worth" here. They are the only devices "worth" their price as evidenced by how well they hold their value and how much consumers are willing to pay for them. They are not "worth" the high price if you are valuing the internals (what GPU, processor, memory, HD you get).
I've ended up with multiple iPads over the years despite my best efforts. They definitely do stop working after a while. I've also noticed MacBooks get burning hot doing a video conference for more than 15 minutes. And I'm not a hardcore gamer, but my kids play Minecraft and it's fine by glitchy.
Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.
Now do me this favor: take your experience and opinion, and compare it to others. How many people share this with you? If the Acer was just that substantially better in terms of value and build quality, why isn't Acer the #1 laptop in the US? Why do so many companies, organizations, and developers not share this take with you? What may you be missing?
Hackintosh are hard to build, by any reasonable definition, even for an average HN users. It's possible some people find that easy, but surely it is much harder than following an even medium difficulty tutorial.
Have you tried building one before? I built mine for the first time in February with 0 prior experience with such things and followed this guide: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-...
If you're doing a config with a motherboard that's well used you can generally find the right configs to use. If you're using something not often used, you'll have trouble with the initial setup but once you get over that initial setup trouble in my experience everything will work and stay fine.
There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.
I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.
I'm now first time using Mac due to my project. It works fine, but I do prefer Linux for development. Hackintosh probably makes sense if you're stuck on some Mac software though.
Ironically I'm using Mac over Linux because I want to use parallels to run a windows application that I must use. I tried using VMware for a while but it drove me insane that everytime I switched workspaces it would exit fullscreen.
> Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile.
Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)
It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.
I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?).
It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.
I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again.
All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.
FaceTime has the best UX of all the solutions I've seen so far.
Seamless integration in the OS as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem and lightweight native clients (it seems to use hardware encoding/decoding does not make my fans spin like Zoom or any browser-based solution). No accounts or meeting/room IDs to remember or join, it just works with Apple IDs (which you're already logged into) or phone numbers for iOS devices (which work even if you somehow don't use an Apple ID).
Right. But I don’t want to have to tell a client to download an app. I’d rather they just go to a url like they do on an iPad. Not sure what the difference in browsers is between them, but I can’t imagine it’s much.
It's very disheartening that when you try to connect with firefox, it says you should use chrome. This is a direct stab in the heart of the people who would favor it over zoom because it is free software.
As others have said, this seems to be a Firefox issue, once you get a larger number of participants in a call it becomes unusable with a single firefox user.
I have actually considered running an instance of jitsi meet where I block out all non-chrome browsers. I don't like it, but if you pragmatically want something that works...
I really feel in this situation Mozilla should put all resources on fixing issues like these.
It works on Firefox but does not have simulcast support so whenever someone on Firefox joins, other devices have to use vastly more CPU and bandwidth. My phone dropped 50% battery in 10 minutes with a Firefox user on.
It is being worked on [1].
Firefox was a supported browser but they took it off the list in January until this issue is fixed. [2]
AFAIK Firefox on GNU/Linux uses Gstreamer. Maybe you need to install gstreamer codec packages.
Update: Firefox switched to FFmpeg and removed Gstreamer support some time ago. I have FFmpeg installed from rpmfusion, but I don't know if that's relevant to WebRTC and Jitsi.
And here I am, opening Chrome just so I can join audio in Zoom conference. For some reason it says "Your browser does not support using the computer’s Audio device" and recommends Chrome.
I'm curious... between Whereby and Jitsi and I assume other browser-based video solutions relying on WebRTC...
...how big is the barrier these days to building a "videoconferencing platform" supporting millions of people... that runs on a single server?
Because if you need to do is build a pretty website that essentially just keeps track of meeting names and the names and IP addresses of participants...
...while each client is P2P-streaming their full-res videostream while speaking or other participants have them pinned... and every other client is P2P-streaming a low-res videostream to power the thumbnails (and similar decisions about which computer is the main audio source and when, or picking a single peer to serve as the audio mixer)...
What else is there to do, really?
(I mean obviously there's fancy stuff you can add like screensharing, chat, authentication, etc... and browser-specific bugfixes and quirks presumably...)
But are we at a point where anyone can write a functional videoconferencing platform in a week, and platforms are differentiating mainly on nicer UX and extra features?
Or is there something huge I'm missing here, where implementing WebRTC is somehow a lot harder than it seems, and/or still requires server farms to route the streams through in certain cases?
It doesn't scale well beyond a handful of people. You need *N bandwidth to send and receive, and without a thing called 'simulcast' (creating multiple, different quality stream simultaneously) which doesn't have good browser support the quality is defined by the lowest common denominator. A central server solves many, many issues that result in better quality.
Jitsi itself barely works on Firefox and not at all on mobile devices (without their app).
It actually works fine on Android browsers (checked in FF and Chrome), you just have to load the page in Desktop mode so that it stops pushing the apps to you.
Hopefully they'll reconsider their decision if they want it to get popular...
I rolled https://video.etherpad.org out within 5 minutes. It's a single command once Etherpad is installed (npm install ep_webrtc).
There is one complication most people don't realize -- Failed Reverse NAT traversal: For this you need a TURN server (I'm intentionally ignoring STUN for obvious reasons).
TURN servers have to route the actual media (video / audio) from user a <> b <> c but only if the user(s) can't directly connect. We hit Tb's a day through our TURN server and it gets expensive.
But complexity wise, it's an absolute doddle! Give it a go, if you have nodejs installed 90% of your work is done!
Silly question, because I tried to run Nextcloud Talk and ran into odd connection issues for a user who I believe is behind a corporate firewall and so I needed to stand up “coturn”: what’s the obvious reason for avoiding STUN? And what would you recommend as the simplest/best TURN server implementation?
Hosting cost is the biggest barrier to building a video conferencing solution which scales to millions of users. We setup a Jitsi meet instance and with just 6 parties it pegged a core on the server CPU at 50%.
Admittedly one of the users was on Firefox which causes CPU load to spike with Jitsi but either way video conferencing is bandwidth and processor intensive.
Otherwise the WebRTC technology is stable and works well across browsers - especially for audio. Just scaling it and getting folks to pay for it so it’s economically feasible to host is another thing.
Bandwidth and processing power are limiting factors. Our department tried to run a large Big Blue Button instance to support a dozen of conferences at the same time, ranging from 10-150 participants, all day long.
The experience says: you need hardware (not virtual), starting from 32 cores and 64GB RAM, it turned out it was not enough, added another machine, then another machine, ... and more.
I wonder if anyone (who also has Zoom) could comment on how Jitsi actually compares to Zoom for 20+ people with full video? (since the title pits it against Zoom)
I'm seeing comments how how good Jitsi is, but can someone categorically say Jitsi is comparable to or better than Zoom?
The advantages of Zoom are ease of setup, smooth simultaneous video experience (tiled) for 20+ participants, and breakout rooms. The experience is so good that I was convinced to fork out my own money for a personal subscription. If Jitsi can do all of the above, I'd be inclined to try it out for my next meeting.
We started using BigBlueButton at the the University. I tried to teach and there is nothing in it that is specifically lecture focused, but if you just use it as videoconferencing tool with all microphones muted, it does the job for a one-way communication tool. Once students start asking questions it is too limited. The chat clutters soon, the option for raising hands or changing status is useless with large groups. I'd say that the whole interface is useful only for smaller groups up to 10 persons, definitely not above 100 persons.
I have not tried Zoom or Jitsi Meet in such settings and can't compare. They both have some useful options and slightly more options than Big Blue Button (like the Youtube streaming in Jitsi Meet that will save bandwidth).
I was wondering just now why in the midst of all this remote working boom Jitsi Meet is seldom mention. Jitsi Meet has been absolutely stellar every time I've used it. Great interface, not bloated even when running in a browser with 10+ other people, plenty of options to manage conferences with many people (raise-your-hand button, selective muting/soloing, etc). Creating a chat is as easy as typing a name and hitting enter, no account needed! And getting somebody to join is as simple as clicking a link to meet.jitsi.net/yourchatroomname.
On top of that it's open source and end to end encrypted.
Jitsi meet is not end-to-end encrypted [1]. Rather, it is encrypted with TLS between the client and the server, which doesn’t provide the same security/privacy benefit at all.
The website says it’s “fully encrypted,” which I think is misleading.
Edit: WebRTC does not support end-to-end encryption for multiple peers. This means it’s impossible for any browser-supported videoconferencing platform to support e2e encryption, including Zoom and Jitsi. This is where Jitsi actually has a unique advantage - it can be self hosted, which offers the same security benefits as e2e encryption.
Signaling is indeed over HTTPS and media is encrypted with DTLS-SRTP.
No browsers today support end-to-end encryption for multiparty calls.
The advantage that Jitsi offers there is that you can stand it up on your own server in just a few minutes and get protection that is equivalent to end-to-end encryption.
I've been using Jitsi for a while, even though my company uses GSuite. Not going into details about the corporate use since many have already, but the other day it was my daughter's birthday, being on a quarantine and all and having family in different countries, I sent a jisi link to the family groups on whatsapp so we could all sing happy birthday together, everybody got in, it went all very smoothly. Better than the usual business meeting "can you hear me, I hear you, hello" routine. Thank you Jitsi team!
Linux HNers, is there any video-conferencing software that is hardware-accelerated for us Linux users?
Everything I tried (Jitsi on Firefox or Chrome, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Zoom, Slack) consumes a full CPU all of the time (a.k.a. all no hardware acceleration), making fans spin and slowing down other work.
Advice? I'm using Arch Linux & Xorg on a recent Thinkpad with Intel CPU & GPU, and the packages mentioned by the Intel section of https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera... (intel-media-driver, libva-intel-driver, linux-firmware) are installed.
Thanks! So that means H264/VP9-based conferencing (-- EDIT but VP8 isn't mentioned, and that's what WebRTC uses, right? -- EDIT2 oh, VP8 is mentioned in https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D65536 , looks accelerated too, cool --) will be accelerated in Firefox on Wayland. Great, one more reason to move away from a wmctrl-dependent script I use, and switch to Wayland.
One more question, in case you know about it:
- Regarding Zoom/Slack/Skype/etc, okay, I'm not surprised: no one uses Linux, so from a money perspective, fixing this is ill-spent engineer time.
- However, I'm surprised that acceleration could be missing in Chrome+Linux too, because Google must have worked on it to ship a good Google Meet experience on Chromebooks. Am I missing anything? (Is there a flag / dependency / binary package I could need to enable it in non-Chromebook Chrome?) Is video acceleration really positively nonexistent on Chrome/Chromium on Linux?
I'm the creator of a remote-first community/open source project called CodeBuddies (a not-for-profit), and we built Jitsi into our hangouts (meetings anyone can schedule to pair program or study together) -- i.e. whenever someone schedules a hangout to meet with someone else in the community, we embed Jitsi as an iframe onto the event page.
We initially used Google Hangouts for the project in 2014, and we've been using Jitsi ever since Google Hangouts deprecated its API in 2017.
I generally love Jitsi; like Google Hangouts, it allows multiple people to screenshare simultaneously in our virtual coworking sessions. However, I have stumbled upon a couple of issues with it:
- higher rates of audio or screensharing issues, especially when the participants are long distance or if one of them has a poor wifi connection, or is on an older computer.
- screensharing with the browser extension sometimes doesn't work, or times out
We're actually rebuilding the CodeBuddies platform right now, and for the next iteration I am strongly considering paying for the Zoom API instead because it's more accessible to people with lower quality wifi connections and for folks on older machines.
An interesting anecdote: they're installing Jitsi Meet in all Catalan prisons as we speak, as the go-to option now that visitors are no longer allowed, installed on the existing computers (i.e. prison libraries).
They're planning to have Whatsapp setup too as a secondary option, because it's the option with widest reach, but that requires buying a bunch of new mobile phones.
An interesting related question would be what software are the different national cabinets, states presidencies and other high ranking officials etc using in their daily conferences.
We have a lot of experience working with Jitsi Meet, if anyone has questions integrating Jitsi, free to send me an email john@taskade.com. Happy to help!
I was wondering what would be the requirement for self-hosting Jitsi - in terms of server resources - bandwidth, CPU etc? Is the Video/VOIP transmitted client to client or does it get routed via the server? Thanks.
I found that it had some issues with people connecting via the web clients. Is there a way to mitigate that or is that just expected with the software?
FWIW, it works great on my Chromebook, meeted up with myself on my Android. Even used x86 Bromite browser on Chromebook, and even blur background worked after a slight delay. Impressive.
I think it shows the sheer incompetence of Google product management that they managed to lose the strong hold Gtalk had. Gtalk worked. People liked it. Hangouts too worked well. I used hangouts in browser in 2013 and it worked very well.
Somehow google decided to replace hangouts with allo and duo, and then deprecated allo, and moved to RCS. I never understand how such decisions get made. Do they think customers have infinite loyalty and will move to any new product launched by the company. A lot of people I know used hangouts. Very few use Duo.
No compelling revenue stream, to a company the size of Google. Probably seen as a fun project that got boring once the hard work (of fixing bugs) started.
Back in undergrad (ca 2013) when I got super serious about privacy, I used the Jitsi client to videoconference with friends over my XMPP server [1]. It was pretty much the only open-source VoIP solution I could get working at the time. The experience was actually pretty smooth, with quality comparable to Skype and Hangouts at the time.
The main pain point was that I had to force everyone to download Jitsi and connect to my XMPP server...
Excited to see they're still doing cool stuff!
[1]Technically the XMPP server is just session management.
We switched from Slack to Mattermost internally, and while setting it up I noticed Jitsi integration offered. I've been really impressed by it, and we're working to move most meetings to it. Some teams are still using Zoom, but I don't think that's going to last very long!
My Brazilian Jiujitsu academy is trying it out, too, for virtual classes during shutdown. We just held the first today, and a bunch of non-technical parents were able to get things set up for their kids so that we could all attend a class together. It worked quite well. Given the price, it's a really impressive piece of software.
Also easy to skin and deploy - we setup a custom branded instance for our customers to use during the pandemic within a couple of days:
https://meet.brring.com/
It’s rather incredible what it can do:
* SIP gateway to support inbound telephony dial in
* Meeting recording
* Auto scaling of the video bridges to dynamically handle load
* Native iOS, Android and even Apple Watch clients
I also deployed a Jitsi instance and was surprised how easy it was. I have two questions for you:
1. Do you see high CPU usage when there are multiple conferences with a few participants happening simultaneously?
2. How did you set up conference recording? I know Jibri exists but the installation instructions are quite confusing. It seems you need a VM per conference you want to record. Is that the case?
1. Yes, it has pretty high CPU usage unfortunately and that’s despite the attempts of Jitsi to offload h264 encoding onto the clients. You could in theory lock it to standard definition video though which would reduce CPU usage a lot.
We now use it for most meetings, works very well so far, several sessions in parallel with several dozen people at the same time (but mostly only using audio).
Screen sharing works fine as well.
We made the experience that they are unfortunately right about requiring chrome (chromium works fine as well).
Would be great if firefox support could come back.
It seems to work in Firefox despite the browser warning.
What do you use for authentication? Do you have an existing ldap server? I spooled up a server for neighbors and family to use on my personal vps and the user account management promises to be problematic using the internal auth mechanism.
Several other comments have touched on this, but firefox unfortunately while it seems to work creates issues, even for the other participants. It just seems a lot less stable as soon as several firefox clients connect.
If I can offer some UX feedback, the golden rule of all UX design is to eliminate question marks.
The typing animation in the placeholder draws all my attention. Puzzled, I tried to make sense of ForwardShelvesCollapseClose for several seconds, when I should have been reading the landing page copy.
The principle to design by omission is to ask if an element answers the question you want me to ask, or raises the question you want me to ask, e.g.
1. "How much does it cost?"
2. "Where do I buy it?"
3. "How do I share it?"
Whilst its great that people are iterating on existing products out there, I feel slightly sad that we just have a load of "alternatives" that don't play nicely with each other.
It would be much nicer if I could use FaceTime, whilst speaking to someone on Hangouts, plus someone else on Jitsi. Apart from discovery, what is stopping that? I'm assuming they all use basically the same underlying codecs, of course!
I was looking at the Matrix clients yesterday, to set up a video chat room for elderly relatives. Everything seems just a bit too confusing or unpolished. I want something simple, functional and cross platform. At the moment I’m feeling Zoom with scheduled meeting times is probably the best bet. I’ll test this out, but does anyone have any other thoughts, or any non-proprietary recommendations?
Do you mean for more than 3 - the call/video is routed through the server and would consume server bandwidth? If so how is jitsi paying for all this if it is free?
8x8 is a huge VoIP company. McDonald’s uses them, so when you call McDonald’s, you are calling an 8x8 number.
My firm used to use them. Their tech was rock solid but clunky for our stack so we switched to RingCentral. Quality isn’t as good, and I wonder often if we made a mistake.
I can hook your business and anyone remote up with free sip LCD screen desk phones, usually polycomm and unlimited long distance, SD-WAN managed data if needed business phone lines with app for all phones, desktop soft phone and video bridge from Gotomeeting for s fraction of what I was paying before. I just helped a 500 employees company get 500 new phones and cut their phone bill by over half. They were being charged $25 per line, $5 per phone lease and even being charged for ac power adapter... Made the switch and saving them thousands a month with an awesome world wide network that also includes pro gotomeeting accounts for each employee. They're less than half what they were paying and taxes also cheaper and no surprise fees... Message me or call me if you want a referral. I'm looking at jitsi as a way to help my daughter's connect with their teachers. I know zoom in what everyone is pushing now because it's just so easy but it also costs if you go over the minutes... Not much though. I wanted to offer free... Willing to hear any advice for integrating edX platform with jitsi
I looked at Jitsi recently as I was thinking about self-hosting it (I have the bandwidth).
My concerns:
It seems to be based on XMPP and require an XMPP server. They offer a quick-start guide on configuring it however I am not sure how secure the default configuration is - I'm worried the quick start guide is about "get it working", not "make it secure" and I don't have XMPP knowledge nor the desire to learn a complicated protocol just to be able to run this securely.
Why does it need an XMPP server? I do not want nor care about XMPP and everyone will be joining via browsers anyway. As far as I'm concerned it's just one (very big) moving part that I don't want to be responsible for.
Overall it left a sour & sad taste in my mouth. There's no way I'm putting this thing on the public Internet; the attack surface seems too large and too many opportunities to screw it up.
Jitsi uses XMPP(prosody) for MUC- basically coordination and control of sessions. XMPP is not exposed directly to the user, they use a BOSH client abstraction to convert that to http. It is actually good design and scales well. we have scaled the bridge to 500 plus concurrent sessions without lot of production tuning in non P2P mode (generally harder more resource intensive).
This still means the outside world can interact with the XMPP server, correct?
If so then this is my concern - an XMPP server seems like a huge attack surface for the tiny bit of functionality Jitsi needs (I'm confident it's using less than 10% of the actual capabilities of the XMPP server, which means the rest of the code paths are mostly untested in this scenario and are ripe for abuse and potential exploits).
In your case, is this an internal server or is it open to the Internet?
It is authenticated, i.e. only logged in users have access. Prosody is well tested XMPP implementation and is used in many production application. meet.jit.si is unauthenticated deployment and many people use it.
I wouldn't call it a tiny bit of functionality, MUC and SFU are the two main components of any video conferencing solution. XMPP helps provide MUC capability, Jicofo is the component you can see the implementation here https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo
BOSH does not allow all operations available via XMPP standard, there are restrictions possible, to maintain security.
I too balked at the stack required to self host jitsi, it felt overly complicated for personal use.
But given the interest in video chat now and the sorry state of affairs of the ecosystem, I gave it another go this week. It still seems convoluted, but they provide a docker compose file to deal with all of those complexities. I used it and set a server up using docker compose within a few minutes.
As far as I can tell, the annoying thing of self hosting is going to be user management. Realistically you shouldn't allow guests to create meetings, and that means you need an ldap server if you want more than a couple of users.
You could use LDAP, but really the default configuration allows for Prosody commands, e.g. prosodyctl adduser user@example.com
What I did was set up a vanilla Jitsi Meet instance (on DigitalOcean) and then create a shared user / pass per room share with my team. Feel free to message me if you have any questions.
Jitsi grew out of Google's Jingle extensions to the Jabber protocol for voice and video calls. And WebRTC call initiation requires at least a custom solution for exchanging SDP messages. So if you don't want to have an XMPP server in your setup, you need another server to handle all that signaling.
My argument is that it would require less code (thus less potential bugs and vulnerabilities) to implement the SDP exchange. I'm suspecting that Jitsi only uses a tiny bit of the capabilities of the XMPP server which means most of it is there doing nothing besides being a potential liability.
It is based on WebRTC, so the actual video data doesn't pass through a central server. Google Duo uses this same technology. There _is_ a central server but that is just to glue all the handshakes together. The video/audio don't pass through it, it is all peer-to-peer, so scaling is more so on the client application and the available bandwidth. WebRTC dynamically changes the bitrate of the stream depending on connection though, so it should scale nicely.
I haven't tried a large conference on meet.jit.si yet though, only 1:1. But if there are performance issues it is likely the client application itself that needs performance tuning.
That's the problem. This is supposed to be the time for Jitsi to be widely used and is a credible and a privacy-respecting, open-source alternative to Zoom. But will it break out from the free and open source audiences and reach into the mainstream where Zoom is? I hope so and it should.
Open-source, iOS and Android apps, self-hosting, video chat and first class web client support are all attractive and competing required features to stand a chance against Zoom and aside from its technical merits, it just needs to be more aggressive in marketing itself to capture some mindshare. Or even the name its should be changed to something less clever and to a more user friendly one which could be a start...
I don't know the story behind the name, but I didn't realize it was clever and I do consider it very user friendly -- short, memorable, stands out, easy to pronounce.
I am afraid that the free model of their service will not work very well if tens of thousands of teams start to use this now. It is easier to trust the known brands and organizations that also charges a bit when you use their system a lot.
Most of the Jitsi devs are employed by 8x8, which offers a service based on it: https://8x8.vc and it also integrates it in Virtual Office, it's core product. Disclaimer: I work for 8x8.
The main reasons for Zooms popularity (and in general the most important features of a videoconferencing software) are accessibility and reliability.
Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).
(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)
Exactly this. Zoom is crushing it here. Whatever negatives they are doing privacy side is paying of BIG time in ease of use.
Did a call recently, host wanted to google hangouts. 50% could not get in. Finally someone else said let's just use Zoom. 1 minute later we are all in. I think google doesn't work well with domains with hangouts meet blocked if you invite folks on those so they need to spin up a different account. Or people don't know meets is restricted to domain users only? Or get confused between hangouts / chat / meets etc. Something is wonky sometimes with google in terms of 5 solutions to one problem.
Zoom’s privacy issues are more than minor, if my friends started using it and I couldn’t get the web version to work I wouldn’t do a conference call with them.
Can I ask if you are using video conferencing in a business setting?
When folks are trying to get stuff done in tough circumstances NO ONE has ANY patience for the home built / funky / privacy enhanced multi-click setup. Especially not the top executives now dialing in from home who aren't tech forward. IT doesn't want to trouble shoot things either - all of a sudden you have 1000+ folks video conferencing.
I'd be interested in these dealbreaker privacy problems in the current client.
I used to use webex more, but zoom just had had some incredible mindshare growth. Its literally the first suggestion it seems when there is a problem with a conference setup. Latency is also good on zoom which makes the audio side nicer in my experience.
Super reliable. Our rather large company was all Skype all the time, but people started doing Zoom because it worked all the time. Now we're almost fully Zoom.
Looks good but I am hesitant to recommend it to my children's friend's parents (who are all trying to settle on a platform at the moment) because of the ease with which the kids might enter a short room name and find themselves on the recieving end of an unwelcome 'chatroulette experience'.
It would be good if the app version could have some parental controls added and/or the web version could enforce a minimum room name length/complexity. Meanwhile, perhaps a browser plugin to enforce that wouldn't be too hard to knock up.
We used it for a couple of month but we had 3 main issues
1) for whatever reason the stability dropped significantly during that period. The first 1-2 month, all was fine. After that, we constantly lost people (we are in NZ, EU, America's, Asia). Maybe the demand grew but they didn't scale the servers
2) sometimes we want to quickly share our editor/screen. Sadly the compression makes it impossible to read text (zoom correctly shows text)
3) we are often in countries with heavy censorship (UAE, China). Only zoom really works. Not even meet, slack-video, Skype works
how many people were in it? I'm trying to set something up for my family to play Jackbox with more than 10 people, google hangouts caps out at 10 and I don't really want to make everyone set up the zoom app since I'll have to do tech support for everyone. (disclaimer: I work at Jackbox, I'm in charge of the multiplayer servers)
I've tried jitsi for a group chat with friends, but the CPU usage went to the roof and we had other problems too. Apparently that's an issue with Firefox, as I've learned here.
Anyway, we were using talky.io, which is also a WebRTC based solution and it worked really well. No registration, good Audio/Video quality, screen sharing. No background blurring though, if that's what you need.
The mobile application needs some work. The essential and basic operations of creating a room[1] and sharing a link to that room[2] are confusing. Other than that, the video and sound quality were great.
[1]: There's no "Go" button and no automatically generated room name like on the web app.
[2]: The menu option is hidden two layers deep and is named non-descriptively "Room information".
To the authors, if they see this: I'm trying to use this to call my mother and we are both just looking at our own faces. I've confirmed -- via separate video call on phones -- that we're at the same URL, both look connected, and both have camera permissions. There's no indication that anything is wrong on either of our computers.
Recently started using this and found it very seamless. There is a Keybase chat bot to drop meeting links into your conversation so you can jump on a call: https://keybase.io/jitsibot/chat
I've noticed that a lot of people have an aversion to software that doesn't have a name that's made from English word(s). This is possibly because the most common software out there has this property, and so people subconsciously associate it with quality (exceptions abound, of course, Samsung, Adobe, but I think that you need to reach a certain size to break free from the negative stigma in English-speaking countries).
Come to think of it, this may be why Linux is still seen as an outsider to non-technical people, as though it were less of a serious product than Windows (which has an English word as a name).
The name Linux is not the issue, the fact that it isn't a product might be.
Think of Windows or macOS, pick a version, you can picture what it looks like and what apps run on it. Linux isn't a specific product. You can't install Linux 10.15. You might install a specific kernel version, or a specific distro version, but Linux is more of an assemblage of packages rather than one cohesive end-product. And it's not as easy to picture Linux in your mind. One Linux user will use default Ubuntu installation, one Linux user will boot directly to terminal because window managers, and other Linux user will be using Android which is completely different case as well.
SIP Communicator is renamed Jitsi (from the Bulgarian “жици”, or “wires”), since it now also supports audio and video over XMMP’s Jingle extensions and it would be silly to still call it SIP Communicator.
It's a feeling, so not easily rationalizable... I wonder if it has anything to do with being "Gypped" (), but for me even outside of that connotation, the word evokes negative feeling.
() Interestingly, I too have for the first time looked up the etymology and feel uncomfortable; I think because I've only ever heard it before, and assumed it was spelled differently like "Jipped" or something
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/242429836...
I normally complain about terrible open source branding but didn't have a negative reaction to this branding when I saw this post.
Goes to show how important it is to do user research on a broad swath of the population to make sure you have branding that isn't off-putting to a significant subset of people.
Definitely. There is also universal agreement in good branding vs bad branding. I’ve been browsing the top branding blog for over 12 years now: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
When you write 500 simultaneous users, do you mean:
1. 500 users making multiple calls across our servers at the same time?
2. 500 users on a single call?
They're currently owned by a VoIP provider that I would guess uses some of the Jitsi tech in-house. They've been through a few acquisitions at this point and continue to maintain their free software, so I'm optimistic they'll continue to do so.
Exactly my question. The old adage "if you're not paying for it then you're the product" makes me worried to try Jitsi, unless they come out clean about their business model.
I tried suggesting Jitsi for Zoom to a group. I didn't attend the first meeting, but they said they tested both and found that Zoom was ``much more stable'' and had ``much better sound quality''.
FWIW, I joined a Zoom meeting and the audio was all garbled, barely understandable. Don't know if it matters that one user joined with a browser. We switched to Jitsi and the session went very smoothly afterwards.
How does this work for normal video calling e.g. calling your parents? Every time I want to talk with them, sharing a video link with them first seems to create a friction. I badly want an alternative to the awful Skype.
Any of the founding team here for Jitsi? I am helping a friend build a virtual community and this solution is perfect but we need a bit of help getting started. Would love to connect jiwanix@gmail.com!
In Firefox, if you click the 3-dots and then "Request desktop site", it let's you use the website for video conferencing... (which should be the default even for mobile)
Is this really as good as zoom? Zoom's UX is terrible, the only reason it has taken over is because they are better at preserving audio quality and doing echo cancellation than previous contenders.
I assume the use case there is that you create a meeting and then put the link in the calendar invite that you send. But, I'd like to know more about how long your "own" that meeting URL before it expires. I'll ask in the jitsi forums.
The meeting technically exists as long as there are participants. Anyone can join the url so if you pick something unique and hard to guess you'll probably be the only one to ever use it.
The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world of Javascript package managers.
Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.
Here's a better design, in text:
- Who are we? This is Jitsi Meet video conferencing
- How do I use it? Just type a name for your meeting in the box and get started, you'll be able to share from there.
The old line about "can someone's granny use?" this comes to mind. If I seem annoyed, I am, we need successful competitors to things like Zoom and Google but that means getting non-developers to use them.
Granny won’t set up a room, but you can send her a link on email or Whatsapp which can open the chat in a browser or redirect to an app download depending on platform, and also offer dial in options. That seems as intuitive as the process can be. The app also seems extremely straightforward. Granny usability is actually exactly what I’m looking for, and on first glance I’m impressed.
Have you tried it with a granny? Have you ever trained people in using computers?
I have, young and old, professionally, some of them grannies, and this does not cut the mustard by a long chalk. I can imagine a few ways to make it easier.
Absolutely this. We need alternatives to Zoom and Hangouts which can be used by non-developers which should "just work" which Jitisi does to some extent but unfortunately, Zoom is still in the lead with a reason.
End users were looking for software a while back to do remote work or tele-conferencing and first it was companies that were using Zoom or Hangouts. By the time I saw actors and the mainstream media were mentioning and using Zoom [0], its mindshare was established right there and Jitsi now has a lot of catching up to do.
> The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world of Javascript package managers.
> Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.
I think this is a little overly ageist but yeah - if you're not familiar with the kind of URLs generated by services like Gfycat then it looks pretty strange, and it's not really clear what's going on (why is it typing these strange words in the box?)
I wouldn't say that any individual 20 year old would be more or less considerate of people outside their social circle / age bracket than a 50 year old, of course, I even know some who are[0]. As a cohort though, I've no qualms!
[0] They don't develop single page apps using the trendiest Javascript frameworks though, maybe there's a self-selection link ;-)
I looked at Jitsi's website and Github yesterday and couldn't find any documentation. For example, it wasn't clear to me why I would want to run Videobridge, or what features Meet has.
Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens. Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.