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Maybe it's just me, but I find it a bit ... odd? to have my video conferencing tool running inside the browser. I have Skype running as a separate application

Maybe it's just me, but I find it a bit ... odd? to have my video conferencing tool running inside the browser. I have Skype running as a separate application and I have it's icon in the Dock and I can switch to it, it runs in the background, etc. I know that this is the tool responsible for my communication. My contacts are also running it and it usually starts automatically on their system so most probably they're online. A conference tool running inside the browser doesn't have these properties. I look at it as a website which I can visit or not. This, I guess is a problem with all WebRTC implementations out there - it might be great in terms of capabilities, but it's not very practical in terms of heavy daily usage.

dvirsky 11y ago
Considering that Google Hangouts is perhaps the best video conferencing tool I've tried, it's not odd for me at all.
- IanCal 11y ago
  My "dream" VC tool is basically just a stable version of google hangouts.
  - dsl 11y ago
    Hangouts Video is whitelabeled from Vidyo with some weird bolt ons to make it Googley. You could try going to them directly.
    - IanCal 11y ago
      Interesting, thanks for the tip.
    - kurczakov 11y ago
      Don't think that is a case - https://vsee.com/blog/google-hangouts-dropped-vidyo/ https://vsee.com/blog/google-hangouts-dropped-vidyo/
      - dublinben 11y ago
        According to the comments, that article is quite inaccurate.
      - dvirsky 11y ago
        Google is not listed on the customers list of vidyo BTW
        dsl 11y ago
        My current company, for example, contractually obligates our vendors to never mention us.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Sigh. We used to make a really good tool, but it was all proprietary. It supported up to 20 participants with full-duplex audio and multiple doc sharing. But it was part of a full product for collaborative teams, and we couldn't figure out the sales process fast enough. It scaled well - hundreds of different conference participants per server node; media nodes that supported hundreds of simultaneous streams. Stream switching was on the order of scores of milliseconds (not seconds like all the webrtc stuff).
  - dvirsky 11y ago
    did it work inside the browser? as a Linux user, that's a big plus, not having to be stuck with some lame version like in Skype's case, or not have any working version at all.
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      No, that's the kiss of death for performant conferencing. At least at the levels we were reaching for. And we only had a headless version of the media engine on Linux, which was used for 'bot testing and for the media node (MCU in webrtc parlance). In other words, the cloud version. We had a port to Android for a little while. Then a Wine version. But the native Linux one was an orphan.
- cgh 11y ago
  Have you ever tried Cisco's Webex? It's pretty good, plus it has desktop sharing and various other handy things.
stingraycharles 11y ago
You should take a look at tools like https://appear.in https://appear.in. They make it so easy to create ad-hoc conference rooms for people coming from different mediums (for example, sales pitches with many people accross the world, organised in under a minute). These tools are great if you want to organise something like several people from Slack, Skype and email (customers).

dvirsky 11y ago

Considering that Google Hangouts is perhaps the best video conferencing tool I've tried, it's not odd for me at all.

IanCal 11y ago
My "dream" VC tool is basically just a stable version of google hangouts.
- dsl 11y ago
  Hangouts Video is whitelabeled from Vidyo with some weird bolt ons to make it Googley. You could try going to them directly.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the tip.
  - kurczakov 11y ago
    Don't think that is a case - https://vsee.com/blog/google-hangouts-dropped-vidyo/ https://vsee.com/blog/google-hangouts-dropped-vidyo/
    - dublinben 11y ago
      According to the comments, that article is quite inaccurate.
    - dvirsky 11y ago
      Google is not listed on the customers list of vidyo BTW
      - dsl 11y ago
        My current company, for example, contractually obligates our vendors to never mention us.
JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Sigh. We used to make a really good tool, but it was all proprietary. It supported up to 20 participants with full-duplex audio and multiple doc sharing. But it was part of a full product for collaborative teams, and we couldn't figure out the sales process fast enough. It scaled well - hundreds of different conference participants per server node; media nodes that supported hundreds of simultaneous streams. Stream switching was on the order of scores of milliseconds (not seconds like all the webrtc stuff).
- dvirsky 11y ago
  did it work inside the browser? as a Linux user, that's a big plus, not having to be stuck with some lame version like in Skype's case, or not have any working version at all.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    No, that's the kiss of death for performant conferencing. At least at the levels we were reaching for. And we only had a headless version of the media engine on Linux, which was used for 'bot testing and for the media node (MCU in webrtc parlance). In other words, the cloud version. We had a port to Android for a little while. Then a Wine version. But the native Linux one was an orphan.
cgh 11y ago
Have you ever tried Cisco's Webex? It's pretty good, plus it has desktop sharing and various other handy things.

stingraycharles 11y ago

You should take a look at tools like https://appear.in https://appear.in. They make it so easy to create ad-hoc conference rooms for people coming from different mediums (for example, sales pitches with many people accross the world, organised in under a minute). These tools are great if you want to organise something like several people from Slack, Skype and email (customers).