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BigBlueButton: An open source web conferencing system

127 points by angristan 7y ago

nickthegreek 7y ago
Its been awhile since I used BBB, but I found issues with it when there were over ~20 participants. Anyone know how well BBB scales these days?
- jtbayly 7y ago
  Well... the website won't load for me right now, so it's not promising. :|
  - andrewkdinh 7y ago
    The website loads, it’s just extremely slow to do so
lxe 7y ago
Just tried their demo -- looks full-featured and solid overall! Setup documentation seems pretty detailed.
- giomasce 7y ago
  That's right. Although I tried to setup self hosted both BBB and Jitsi Meet, and was not rally satisfied. Both had quite some problems with audio and video streams, which either didn't start or froze later. I think that both software are better than I could setup, because I've seen them working pretty good, but I'm not sure what is the secret ingredient.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    The secret sauce in jitsi is NAT traversal so make sure you don’t have an overzealous firewall on the hosting server. Second it relies on google STUN servers, changing to different servers or using ips instead of dns may help fix problems on the client end. Jitsi is amazing when setup properly (I have some deploy scripts somewhere out there, Jitsi is not truely open source as it seems)
    - giomasce 7y ago
      Do you have some link to documentation explaining how to setup/debug this kind of things? I tried to deploy Jitsi Meet on a EC2 instance with all access permitted, but it still had quite a few problems. Did not try to tinker with STUN, though.
  - v8engine 7y ago
    My search lead me to STUN and TURN server as this secret ingredient. I don't know what they mean though.
codefined 7y ago
How does this compare to something like 'Jitsi Meet'?
- psim1 7y ago
  A better comparison would be Adobe Connect (https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html).
  - mkl 7y ago
    Has anyone used both Adobe Connect and BigBlueButton? IME (remote tutorials, video and writing on PDF slides) Adobe Connect kind of works, but is pretty clunky and awful. I'm interested to know how BigBlueButton compares.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      Last I tried BBb it was clunky and awful. It looks much better now I will have to try it again
- giomasce 7y ago
  It is more oriented to teaching, so it's more classroom style: there is a main presenter and many listeners, it had a whiteboard, things like these. It's quite feature-packed, while Jitsi is maybe more minimal.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Jitsi is like zoom, big blue conference is like webex/gotomeeting
Faaak 7y ago
We use this product on our company of ~150 during the COVID work-at-home thingy. It's quite great ! It supports audio and video and is quite reactive for us.
- mkl 7y ago
  Cool. I have a few questions: How many people can you have in sessions simultaneously? Do you use the shared whiteboard? What's it like for people without a stylus? Any idea why it requires such an ancient version of Ubuntu (16.04)?
  - pretendgeneer 7y ago
    That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated.
  - DarkStar851 7y ago
    Taking a quick look, this should be able to run without issue on any distribution. They're using Docker to run all the components. No Ubuntu-specific dependencies.
- v0tary 7y ago
  Several schools in the US are using this for online classes in the face of COVID-19.
- weitzj 7y ago
  Do you have some numbers what capacity one needs for this many people? Is it webrtc? Can you have more than 10 in a video call?
wolrah 7y ago
This seems interesting, but the fact that the officially supported distro is still Ubuntu 16.04 is alarming. There is no good excuse for actively developed software to require an outdated operating system. I get that it's a LTS platform, but so is 18.04. 16.04 only has ~1 year of support left, so deploying infrastructure on it now is idiotic. At this point they should at least be recommending 18.04 and should be testing on betas of 20.04 while considering compatibility issues to be high priority.
- capableweb 7y ago
  Seems like a set of ~8 or something core contributors working on this open source project. You talk about it like it's a professional product. Ubuntu 16.04 is still everywhere and I'm sure they have their reasons for not having time to deploy on multiple platforms / architectures / beta lines in order to test changes. I think you best shot at fixing this problem that has "no good excuse" and using it would be "idiotic" would be to contribute yourself. The least you can do is open a thoughtful issue asking the same things you asked here, but in a way better tone. Even better would be to contribute code but eh, Java. Edit: another comment in this thread: "That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533
  - 0az 7y ago
    The README mentions a BigBlueButton , Inc. Haven't really looked into it though.
  - mekster 7y ago
    "If you don't like it, fix it yourself" approach doesn't really work for many just because it's open source. Why does an open source project has to be mutually exclusive to being a professional product? If the recommended distro is from 4 years ago, people will feel if it's being abandoned and just go look elsewhere.
    - capableweb 7y ago
protomyth 7y ago
Did anyone find a license file? The source code doesn't even have a copyright header.
- capableweb 7y ago
  package.json for the frontend mentions LGPL-3.0, good enough? https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1850694029c7a8516261e215a2c40c9f9/bigbluebutton-html5/package.json#L4 https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1...
f00_ 7y ago
Best open-source, self-hosted solution to this problem. There is a mattermost plugin. Very easy install, requires a 10 - 15$ vps instance. Would like to see if anyone uses this on a large scale
- jdc 7y ago
  Looks like they recommend 500gb storage space for production.. where are running yours?

127 points by angristan 7y ago

Its been awhile since I used BBB, but I found issues with it when there were over ~20 participants. Anyone know how well BBB scales these days?

jtbayly 7y ago
Well... the website won't load for me right now, so it's not promising. :|
- andrewkdinh 7y ago
  The website loads, it’s just extremely slow to do so

lxe 7y ago

Just tried their demo -- looks full-featured and solid overall! Setup documentation seems pretty detailed.

giomasce 7y ago
That's right. Although I tried to setup self hosted both BBB and Jitsi Meet, and was not rally satisfied. Both had quite some problems with audio and video streams, which either didn't start or froze later. I think that both software are better than I could setup, because I've seen them working pretty good, but I'm not sure what is the secret ingredient.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  The secret sauce in jitsi is NAT traversal so make sure you don’t have an overzealous firewall on the hosting server. Second it relies on google STUN servers, changing to different servers or using ips instead of dns may help fix problems on the client end. Jitsi is amazing when setup properly (I have some deploy scripts somewhere out there, Jitsi is not truely open source as it seems)
  - giomasce 7y ago
    Do you have some link to documentation explaining how to setup/debug this kind of things? I tried to deploy Jitsi Meet on a EC2 instance with all access permitted, but it still had quite a few problems. Did not try to tinker with STUN, though.
- v8engine 7y ago
  My search lead me to STUN and TURN server as this secret ingredient. I don't know what they mean though.

codefined 7y ago

How does this compare to something like 'Jitsi Meet'?

psim1 7y ago
A better comparison would be Adobe Connect (https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html).
- mkl 7y ago
  Has anyone used both Adobe Connect and BigBlueButton? IME (remote tutorials, video and writing on PDF slides) Adobe Connect kind of works, but is pretty clunky and awful. I'm interested to know how BigBlueButton compares.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Last I tried BBb it was clunky and awful. It looks much better now I will have to try it again
giomasce 7y ago
It is more oriented to teaching, so it's more classroom style: there is a main presenter and many listeners, it had a whiteboard, things like these. It's quite feature-packed, while Jitsi is maybe more minimal.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  Jitsi is like zoom, big blue conference is like webex/gotomeeting

Faaak 7y ago

We use this product on our company of ~150 during the COVID work-at-home thingy. It's quite great ! It supports audio and video and is quite reactive for us.

mkl 7y ago
Cool. I have a few questions: How many people can you have in sessions simultaneously? Do you use the shared whiteboard? What's it like for people without a stylus? Any idea why it requires such an ancient version of Ubuntu (16.04)?
- pretendgeneer 7y ago
  That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated.
- DarkStar851 7y ago
  Taking a quick look, this should be able to run without issue on any distribution. They're using Docker to run all the components. No Ubuntu-specific dependencies.
v0tary 7y ago
Several schools in the US are using this for online classes in the face of COVID-19.
weitzj 7y ago
Do you have some numbers what capacity one needs for this many people? Is it webrtc? Can you have more than 10 in a video call?

wolrah 7y ago

This seems interesting, but the fact that the officially supported distro is still Ubuntu 16.04 is alarming. There is no good excuse for actively developed software to require an outdated operating system. I get that it's a LTS platform, but so is 18.04. 16.04 only has ~1 year of support left, so deploying infrastructure on it now is idiotic. At this point they should at least be recommending 18.04 and should be testing on betas of 20.04 while considering compatibility issues to be high priority.

capableweb 7y ago
Seems like a set of ~8 or something core contributors working on this open source project. You talk about it like it's a professional product. Ubuntu 16.04 is still everywhere and I'm sure they have their reasons for not having time to deploy on multiple platforms / architectures / beta lines in order to test changes. I think you best shot at fixing this problem that has "no good excuse" and using it would be "idiotic" would be to contribute yourself. The least you can do is open a thoughtful issue asking the same things you asked here, but in a way better tone. Even better would be to contribute code but eh, Java. Edit: another comment in this thread: "That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533
- 0az 7y ago
  The README mentions a BigBlueButton , Inc. Haven't really looked into it though.
- mekster 7y ago
  "If you don't like it, fix it yourself" approach doesn't really work for many just because it's open source. Why does an open source project has to be mutually exclusive to being a professional product? If the recommended distro is from 4 years ago, people will feel if it's being abandoned and just go look elsewhere.
  - capableweb 7y ago

protomyth 7y ago

Did anyone find a license file? The source code doesn't even have a copyright header.

capableweb 7y ago
package.json for the frontend mentions LGPL-3.0, good enough? https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1850694029c7a8516261e215a2c40c9f9/bigbluebutton-html5/package.json#L4 https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1...

f00_ 7y ago

Best open-source, self-hosted solution to this problem. There is a mattermost plugin. Very easy install, requires a 10 - 15$ vps instance. Would like to see if anyone uses this on a large scale

jdc 7y ago
Looks like they recommend 500gb storage space for production.. where are running yours?