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Disclaimer: I used to work at Twilio I'm seeing discussion below about fully open-source solutions (Jitsi Meet) vs. fully proprietary solutions (Zoom). What's

Disclaimer: I used to work at Twilio I'm seeing discussion below about fully open-source solutions (Jitsi Meet) vs. fully proprietary solutions (Zoom). What's interesting about using Twilio is that it is a programmable solution. Case in point: I am building a webpage where people can log-in to a virtual office, so that people working from home don't feel so lonely. I have certain requirements, such as: - All audio is muted - Participants are arranged in a grid - Room is persistent (no need for an "owner") Accomplishing this with either Jitsi or Zoom may have been impossible, because while they are configurable they are not programmable. Now, Twilio isn't the only Video platform on the market (see TokBox, etc), but I think comparing this to Jitsi/Zoom/Hangouts is like comparing apples to oranges.

detaro 7y ago
So Twilio's SDK counts, but Jitsi's doesn't because ...? You can build custom interfaces with all your requested features with that too.
- crabasa 7y ago
  The difference in the ability of a developer to modify an open source software product (think: Gimp or Jitsi Meet) to suit their needs versus using a platform SDK that is designed to provide flexibility and to be used by devs is massive. I spent some time looking at the Jitsi Meet source to confirm this assertion: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/ https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/ It was quite clear that trying to use that code to execute my use case above would have been a very large waste of time, and quite possibly (given the lack of docs) a futile exercise.
  - detaro 7y ago
    https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet
    - crabasa 7y ago
      I read and re-read this "examples" docs page several times: https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/API.md https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/API.... Hats off to anyone who can rapidly go from those docs to a deployed and working app. I was able to modify the repo linked in the parent to suit my needs in roughly 2-3 hours, much of which was install/setup.
  - sandGorgon 7y ago
    This is the react example - https://meetrix.io/blog/webrtc/integrate-jitsi-meet-to-react-app.htm https://meetrix.io/blog/webrtc/integrate-jitsi-meet-to-react... These are the React features supported, including chat/conference,etc https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/tree/master/react/features https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/tree/master/react/featur...
tmpz22 7y ago
It definitely has a lot of potential but nobody is going to re-assign a bunch of engineers to code up a solution to their immediate need for massive teleconferencing capabilities today - as I imagine the timing of this launch is heavily influenced by the Coronaviris and current demand of these tools. Where I think it does play in is that while Zoom is probably making a lot of sales right now, they are probably starting to regret their start-up friendly pricing model now that they have to fund large engineering efforts to keep up with demand. I imagine Zoom prices will go up while Twilio APIs will stay fairly consistent. There may be some cool start-ups that get built on top of this as well.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > It definitely has a lot of potential but nobody is going to re-assign a bunch of engineers to code up a solution to their immediate need for massive teleconferencing capabilities today No, but I bet a lot of places are (like the big enterprise shop I'm in) both scaling out their existing solutions for things like conferencing and VDI that were initially chosen to support more limited use and starting to consider long-term solutions to support more comprehensive at-need remote work.
- kwindla 7y ago
  We're a startup that makes a video API that competes with Twilio. I can tell you that we're seeing a big increase in interest this week from both big companies and startups, across a big range of use cases. (Lots of telehealth and online education. Also lots of cool "distributed teams" experiments.)
  - ausjke 7y ago
    what's your website? and what's your advantage to twilio?
randall 7y ago
Also Tokbox is horrible. Twilio is modern and pretty good.
- telesilla 7y ago
  Tokbox has better pricing. What's so horrible about it? I've found their sdk trivial to implement.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
please share when you're done, we've started using Zoom and it's unusable for any non trivial feature on my linux machine.
- ckdarby 7y ago
  You're running an LTS with latest packages & latest Zoom client? Has worked out of the box on Ubuntu 18.04 for the last four months with screen recording, as host, as attendee, background replacement, chat, seminar mode, etc. Yesterday I found one issue, the whiteboard share collab mode doesn't work but the app continues to function fine. FYI: Get rid of unity if you're using that. It'll crash on it's own, not zoom. I'm using i3wm as a tile manager and everything just works as expected.
crabasa 7y ago
Here is a link to my fork of the repo shared by the OP: https://github.com/crtr0/twilio-video-app-react https://github.com/crtr0/twilio-video-app-react You can try it out at: https://video-app-7758-dev.twil.io?passcode=7020447758 https://video-app-7758-dev.twil.io?passcode=7020447758 Just enter your name and the room "HN".
- pizza 7y ago
  Adding text chat to this would also be quite handy
- Krasnol 7y ago
  ERROR Media connection failed or Media activity ceased Error Code: 53405
  - crabasa 7y ago
    Hate to say it, but: Works for me ™ Was that an error on the webpage or in the JS console?
    - wideasleep1 7y ago
      Yep..had to tweak Matrix, Origin, and NoScript before it worked, asked for javascript, then errored 5300 for a bit as I worked the extensions.
      - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        > it asked for JavaScript I'm about 300% unsurprised that this uses JavaScript- correct me if I'm wrong- I don't think there's really a way to do this without it, if we aren't supposed to be using Flash anymore, either.
- gregsadetsky 7y ago
  On mobile Safari, the mic & camera permissions pop up, but after clicking Join Room the page goes blank. Any ideas? It works perfectly using Desktop Chrome.
yed 7y ago
Cisco Webex also has fully programmable SDKs[0], with the flexibility to either manage video windows and controls directly[1] or embed fully functional widgets. Zoom also has extensive APIs and SDKs[2], though I'm not familiar with how flexible they actually are. [0] https://developer.webex.com/docs/platform-introduction https://developer.webex.com/docs/platform-introduction [1] https://github.com/webex/webex-ios-sdk-example-buddies https://github.com/webex/webex-ios-sdk-example-buddies [2] https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/preface/introducing-zoom-sdk https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/preface/int...
- ethbro 7y ago
  Hell is trying to deal with an API / SDK that isn't the vendor's core product. At best, they have no incentive to fix your issues / provide missing documentation. At worst, you're seen as sabotaging revenue from their productized offerings. I've seen very few companies that can successfully be a product and a platform company at the same time.
j45 7y ago
Nice points. Twilio is certainly well supported for developers. Still it feels like a bit of a letdown to see protocols meant to open up communication (RTC) being wrapped in a per minute charge. Kickstarting innovation would be even more possible if charges only kicked in after a high enough threshold. Again, big fan of Twilio and what they did to abstract away telephone hardware.
j1elo 7y ago
Maybe keep the Kurento project on the radar [1]. It provides you with "building blocks" to create an application, I think that's what you mean with programmable: you use it to build the application you need. There are blocks for WebRTC, RTP, RTSP input (not output), and others. You can also apply computer vision to the video, with OpenCV filters. There is a "Composite" filter that places N streams in a grid. And users are expected to write their own fancy "blocks" if needed, so the option is there too. Only important matter would be to see if the currently existing blocks are already providing the features you need, or new ones would have to be created. Some technology from the Kurento project was acquired by Twillio [2], so it's possible (but not sure, I don't really know, maybe the parent commenter knows) that their media services might be based or inspired on Kurento. Full disclosure I currently work for the Kurento project as the main developer, at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. [1]: https://www.kurento.org/ https://www.kurento.org/ [2]: https://www.kurento.org/blog/whats-next-kurento-and-elasticrtc https://www.kurento.org/blog/whats-next-kurento-and-elasticr... EDIT -- I wrote "under the radar" which is exactly the opposite of what I meant to say :-) now fixed
ignoramous 7y ago
AWS recently announced SDK for its Chime conferencing app, too: https://aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk/

detaro 7y ago

So Twilio's SDK counts, but Jitsi's doesn't because ...? You can build custom interfaces with all your requested features with that too.

crabasa 7y ago
The difference in the ability of a developer to modify an open source software product (think: Gimp or Jitsi Meet) to suit their needs versus using a platform SDK that is designed to provide flexibility and to be used by devs is massive. I spent some time looking at the Jitsi Meet source to confirm this assertion: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/ https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/ It was quite clear that trying to use that code to execute my use case above would have been a very large waste of time, and quite possibly (given the lack of docs) a futile exercise.
- detaro 7y ago
  https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet
  - crabasa 7y ago
    I read and re-read this "examples" docs page several times: https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/API.md https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/API.... Hats off to anyone who can rapidly go from those docs to a deployed and working app. I was able to modify the repo linked in the parent to suit my needs in roughly 2-3 hours, much of which was install/setup.
- sandGorgon 7y ago
  This is the react example - https://meetrix.io/blog/webrtc/integrate-jitsi-meet-to-react-app.htm https://meetrix.io/blog/webrtc/integrate-jitsi-meet-to-react... These are the React features supported, including chat/conference,etc https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/tree/master/react/features https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/tree/master/react/featur...

tmpz22 7y ago

It definitely has a lot of potential but nobody is going to re-assign a bunch of engineers to code up a solution to their immediate need for massive teleconferencing capabilities today - as I imagine the timing of this launch is heavily influenced by the Coronaviris and current demand of these tools. Where I think it does play in is that while Zoom is probably making a lot of sales right now, they are probably starting to regret their start-up friendly pricing model now that they have to fund large engineering efforts to keep up with demand. I imagine Zoom prices will go up while Twilio APIs will stay fairly consistent. There may be some cool start-ups that get built on top of this as well.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> It definitely has a lot of potential but nobody is going to re-assign a bunch of engineers to code up a solution to their immediate need for massive teleconferencing capabilities today No, but I bet a lot of places are (like the big enterprise shop I'm in) both scaling out their existing solutions for things like conferencing and VDI that were initially chosen to support more limited use and starting to consider long-term solutions to support more comprehensive at-need remote work.
kwindla 7y ago
We're a startup that makes a video API that competes with Twilio. I can tell you that we're seeing a big increase in interest this week from both big companies and startups, across a big range of use cases. (Lots of telehealth and online education. Also lots of cool "distributed teams" experiments.)
- ausjke 7y ago
  what's your website? and what's your advantage to twilio?

randall 7y ago

Also Tokbox is horrible. Twilio is modern and pretty good.

telesilla 7y ago
Tokbox has better pricing. What's so horrible about it? I've found their sdk trivial to implement.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

please share when you're done, we've started using Zoom and it's unusable for any non trivial feature on my linux machine.

ckdarby 7y ago
You're running an LTS with latest packages & latest Zoom client? Has worked out of the box on Ubuntu 18.04 for the last four months with screen recording, as host, as attendee, background replacement, chat, seminar mode, etc. Yesterday I found one issue, the whiteboard share collab mode doesn't work but the app continues to function fine. FYI: Get rid of unity if you're using that. It'll crash on it's own, not zoom. I'm using i3wm as a tile manager and everything just works as expected.

crabasa 7y ago

Here is a link to my fork of the repo shared by the OP: https://github.com/crtr0/twilio-video-app-react https://github.com/crtr0/twilio-video-app-react You can try it out at: https://video-app-7758-dev.twil.io?passcode=7020447758 https://video-app-7758-dev.twil.io?passcode=7020447758 Just enter your name and the room "HN".

pizza 7y ago
Adding text chat to this would also be quite handy
Krasnol 7y ago
ERROR Media connection failed or Media activity ceased Error Code: 53405
- crabasa 7y ago
  Hate to say it, but: Works for me ™ Was that an error on the webpage or in the JS console?
  - wideasleep1 7y ago
    Yep..had to tweak Matrix, Origin, and NoScript before it worked, asked for javascript, then errored 5300 for a bit as I worked the extensions.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
      > it asked for JavaScript I'm about 300% unsurprised that this uses JavaScript- correct me if I'm wrong- I don't think there's really a way to do this without it, if we aren't supposed to be using Flash anymore, either.
gregsadetsky 7y ago
On mobile Safari, the mic & camera permissions pop up, but after clicking Join Room the page goes blank. Any ideas? It works perfectly using Desktop Chrome.

yed 7y ago

Cisco Webex also has fully programmable SDKs[0], with the flexibility to either manage video windows and controls directly[1] or embed fully functional widgets. Zoom also has extensive APIs and SDKs[2], though I'm not familiar with how flexible they actually are. [0] https://developer.webex.com/docs/platform-introduction https://developer.webex.com/docs/platform-introduction [1] https://github.com/webex/webex-ios-sdk-example-buddies https://github.com/webex/webex-ios-sdk-example-buddies [2] https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/preface/introducing-zoom-sdk https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/sdk/native-sdks/preface/int...

ethbro 7y ago
Hell is trying to deal with an API / SDK that isn't the vendor's core product. At best, they have no incentive to fix your issues / provide missing documentation. At worst, you're seen as sabotaging revenue from their productized offerings. I've seen very few companies that can successfully be a product and a platform company at the same time.

j45 7y ago

Nice points. Twilio is certainly well supported for developers. Still it feels like a bit of a letdown to see protocols meant to open up communication (RTC) being wrapped in a per minute charge. Kickstarting innovation would be even more possible if charges only kicked in after a high enough threshold. Again, big fan of Twilio and what they did to abstract away telephone hardware.

j1elo 7y ago

Maybe keep the Kurento project on the radar [1]. It provides you with "building blocks" to create an application, I think that's what you mean with programmable: you use it to build the application you need. There are blocks for WebRTC, RTP, RTSP input (not output), and others. You can also apply computer vision to the video, with OpenCV filters. There is a "Composite" filter that places N streams in a grid. And users are expected to write their own fancy "blocks" if needed, so the option is there too. Only important matter would be to see if the currently existing blocks are already providing the features you need, or new ones would have to be created. Some technology from the Kurento project was acquired by Twillio [2], so it's possible (but not sure, I don't really know, maybe the parent commenter knows) that their media services might be based or inspired on Kurento. Full disclosure I currently work for the Kurento project as the main developer, at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. [1]: https://www.kurento.org/ https://www.kurento.org/ [2]: https://www.kurento.org/blog/whats-next-kurento-and-elasticrtc https://www.kurento.org/blog/whats-next-kurento-and-elasticr... EDIT -- I wrote "under the radar" which is exactly the opposite of what I meant to say :-) now fixed

ignoramous 7y ago

AWS recently announced SDK for its Chime conferencing app, too: https://aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk/