9 ms·

Jitsi Architecture – legacy desktop application (2011)

233 points by davidjnelson 7y ago

teekert 7y ago
I love Jitsi, before Covid19 I never used it, now I use it daily for calls with family and yesterday I watched a video of our 4x4 trip with friends together with them (5 guys), streaming it from YouTube into the group chat. It worked very well.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  We tried Jitsi Meet as a back-up for Google Meet in our company for the daily scrum, and it works great. The only nit-pick is the Firefox performance bug, but it's not too demanding to use Chromium for now just for Jitsi Meet until that bug gets fixed. My colleagues loved the Youtube playback ability (I put on some elevator muzak waiting for the rest to join), although I had to do a bit of hunting to get rid of the video again. :)
  - stock_toaster 7y ago
    Seems chrome is the only supported browser[1]? Doesn't this make jitsi meet _effectively_ chrome only until they better support firefox/safari/etc[2]. [1]: I get "It looks like you're using a browser we don't fully support....We recommend to try with the latest version of Chrome or Chromium" when trying to use it. [2]: Sounds like webrtc isn't well supported and fairly buggy for some browsers, apparently?
    - Freak_NL 7y ago
      Firefox works as well, but performance issues may arise when the number of participants increases. I've used Jitsi Meet with Firefox, and its fine one-on-one.
    - gwd 7y ago
      In a previous discussion on HN about Jitsi, it was claimed that Firefox was missing some key aspect of the WebRTC standard that made sending video to multiple people more efficient; and that if a single person in the conference was using Firefox, the result would be a lot more CPU utilization for everyone. So it "works" on Firefox, but the experience will be degraded when scaling up to more users. Hopefully FF can prioritize this feature now that the entire world needs high-quality video conferences on a regular basis.
    - tasqa 7y ago
      For more info check the Github issue with links to relevant issues in firefox bugtracker: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
    - jboynyc 7y ago
      I use it in Firefox all the time with no difficulties. The only thing that doesn't work for me is selecting an external (USB PnP) microphone, but apparently that's due to a longstanding bug in Firefox that Jitsi is doing its best to work around.
saghul 7y ago
Note that this article is about the legacy Jitsi desktop application, and NOT about Jitsi Meet, the WebRTC compatible video conferencing project. Source: I'm a Jitsi dev.
- globular-toast 7y ago
  That's good to know. Apparently "Jitsi" was evaluated at my company before I joined but now I'm wondering whether it was the desktop project or Jitsi Meet. Are they strictly desktop and Web-based, respectively?
  - saghul 7y ago
    They are completely different projects. Jitsi (desktop) was a multi-protocol desktop client whicch supported SIP, XMPP, IRC, etc. At one point in time it gained the hability to do multi-party video conferencing, where one participant would become the "focus" and forward everyone's video to everyone else. This was the inception of the concept of an SFU or Selective Forwarding Unit. Then, in order to scale this up the SFU was extrated to a standalone project: Jitsi Videobridge. Roughly around then, WebRTC became a thing and Jitsi was already doing many of the required things to bring the experience to the web, so work continued with Jitsi Meet, a WebRTC compatible video conferencing system. Jitsi Meet is our present and future, but Jitsi (desktop) lives on both as pieces of the puzzle (Jitsi Videobriidge, Jigasi and Jicofo use parts of it) and as a community project, where people interested in keeping it alive ssubmit fixes / improvements.
    - manishsharan 7y ago
      quick question : is the videobridge a multiplexer -- that is all the clients send the webrtc stream to Videobridge and it combines and forwards the streams to the clients ? Or is it signalling server(STUN) and the clients forward streams to each other ? I am asking this as to decide if I could host the videobridge on on home network (video output from multiple clients would be a problem) or if I have to host this on a cloud ?
kolp 7y ago
I've installed my own instance of Jitsi and it's particularly useful for video chats with older people or those less technically able. My use case is elderly in-laws who can use a laptop, but are incapable of installing anything other than malware. Installing Zoom would be too complicated for them and would probably discourage them from participating in a family video chat. With Jitsi, I send them a link by email and text them to check their email. They click on the link, browser opens and voila! - they're able to chat with their family, with zero fuss. Costs me €2.49 per month for a Hetzner cloud instance.
- notechback 7y ago
  Hi, this is really interesting for me. Could you share a bit more details of your setup?
  - reitzensteinm 7y ago
    I am also doing this, so I'll take the liberty of answering. There's a turnkey docker which should take a few minutes to install: https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet Put nginx in front of it with Let's Encrypt and it shouldn't take more than half an hour to set up. After that you basically get a clone of meet.jit.si. I'm using it with the low level JS library in order to build a product that contains video chat. There was a bit more messing about for me, but only a bit.
    - olieidel 7y ago
      nginx and letsencrypt are already included in the docker image - just uncomment the letsencrypt variables in the .env config file :) hope that saves you some time.
      - reitzensteinm 7y ago
        Ah of course, I forgot that was included. I couldn't use that myself due to CORS and a few other things but if you just want Jitsi in a box it would work for sure.
amrx101 7y ago
I have yet to figure out how to 1. how to share screen? 2. How to schedule meet for future? Maybe I am dumb. I will meanwhile stick to Zoom.
- distances 7y ago
  What do you mean with the schedule point? You tell everyone when to join, they join, meeting starts. The rooms exists when someone is in there, you don't need to open them at a certain time.
  - vetinari 7y ago
    Also, there's a thing called "calendar". One can send invitation for a specific time (via another cutting edge tech, "email"), and include an URL to the meeting. Some people even like the fact, that they have their scheduling info in the same place! Isn't the technology wonderful? /s
- fsh 7y ago
  For screen sharing simply click on the "Share your screen" button in the bottom left corner.
k__ 7y ago
Is Jitsi the OSS Zoom killer? I saw many tweets about it today... Edit: Seems like Jitsi Meet is the current contender.
- mhugo 7y ago
  Please someone correct me, but my understanding is that Jitsi meet has a very different architecture compared to Zoom. Jitsi Meet uses a "SFU" which means the A/V stream of each participant is sent to all the others. That basically does not scale in terms of network bandwidth. Zoom seems to use a central server that kind of "mix" streams and send them to all participants. Or something hybrid. Jitsi could be able to connect to an "MCU" like OpenMCU for this kind of architecture, but I have no clue if it is easy or not to deploy. I am working in a full-remote company with ~15 people. Jitsi is ok for meetings with 2-4 people. With more people, it just does not work reliably. Zoom does.
  - k__ 7y ago
    True. Half-OT, but couldn't this be solved somehow by relaying?
  - janinge 7y ago
    Zoom also use the Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) architecture. Or a central server that kind of "mix" streams and send them to all participants, if you will. Jitsi Videobridge does this by receiving simulcast streams from each participant. This server individually picks out streams and qualities that will fit in each recipient's downstream pipe based on measured bandwidth and configured priorities (e.g. you could choose to give more bandwidth to those who are actively speaking, or shut down all but the last N speakers video streams). Yes, the available network bandwith on a Jitsi Videobridge could be a bottleneck. Each meeting need to fit on a single bridge instance. However, using common servers connected at 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps, it shouldn't be any problem to have meetings with substantially more than 2-4 people. Say a HD stream from most webcameras outputs 3 Mbps at full blast, with 50% overhead due to the simulcasting. That's over 2000 participants on a single server connected at 10 Gbps, all receiving all video streams in full quality. For meetings with 2 participants the streams run peer to peer, so here you get the best possible latency and quality. We've set up Jitsi on a VPS instance at a nearby provider, and have not seen any problems with meetings of 10-15 people. Stability and performance also outperforms all the other solutions I've tried. There's currently a bug in Firefox's simulcast implementation, so if you have any participant using this browser, this feature gets disabled for everyone. Even with this issue, I haven't noticed anything but excellent performance with this few number of participants. The following article might also be interesting. https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-vs-zoom-video-quality/ https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-vs-zoom-video-quality/
leonroy 7y ago
Here's the Jitsi architecture: https://i.imgur.com/oDSRzF4.png https://i.imgur.com/oDSRzF4.png Screen grabbed from their excellent tutorial videos: https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/ https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/ One thing we’ve found in deploying Jitsi several times is that good performance is difficult to achieve across parties who are across the globe. We have some of our team in Armenia, Belarus and London and not all of then get consistent performance. I know you can do geographic sharding so all EU or US guests get connected to their closest server but is there a way to ensure cross country participants all get good performance?
- supermatt 7y ago
  You can either: - have the SFU (videobridge) in a more "central" location - have multiple videobridge installations (cascaded bridges) where required with a low latency interconnect (its effectively a smart relay). - you could use geographically distributed forced TURN servers with low latency interconnect to the SFU, but it would be more bandwidth intensive, and not really useful unless you truly have a REALLY low latency interconnect. ---------- Reducing the quality of the streams may also help, if it is bandwidth that is the constraining factor.
bronco21016 7y ago
I spent a ton of time looking at Jitsi yesterday because I’m getting fed up with FaceTime. I really want a living room solution on my large flatscreen because we’ve been spending loads of time doing extended video chats (30+ minutes) with family members. Stuff like family trivia night, etc. The iPhone/iPad screens are too small and really its a pain to hold it in place. I’ve been using a tripod to help some with the holding but the fixed lens is really limiting without an extended HDMI cord. I’ve been connecting to the TV via HDMI but the sound/input is still via the device and the iPhone refuses to do landscape mode. Overall, it’s just suboptimal. Jitsi is open source, has an option for me to host my own server (avid self-hoster for privacy), and appears to work on just about any platform. So I should be able to get most of the family to adopt it. So now I suppose my question is how do I get Jitsi running on my TV? Or can someone offer some other solution that might fit my use case? I really would like to be able to just go to my TV, turn it on, and have instant ability to video chat from my living room to family members on nearly any device. My first thought was to get it running on an Raspberry Pi but it seems that’s not really something that works from all of my searching. Does anyone have any experience there? If that’s the case is there a cheap Android device that could achieve this with some sort of decent camera? Or am I stuck running an x86 system attached to my TV? Does anyone else have Jitsi setup in a conference room like setting with a TV?
- choward 7y ago
  > Or am I stuck running an x86 system attached to my TV? I'm curious why you're opposed to this.
  - bronco21016 7y ago
    Primarily price and power consumption. Having the ability to run something like this on a cheap ARM single board computer would be significantly cheaper. Plus, I have a stack of Raspberry Pis in my office. Who knows how long it would take to order and receive a small form factor x86 system right now.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dvduval 7y ago
What about the cost in terms of per per person per hour?
avmich 7y ago
Outstandingly, by modern standards, clean HTML page, markup-wise. Great content, too.
dmix 7y ago
I noticed Jitsi was purchased by 8x8 in 2018, I'm curious how they're video conferencing software differs from https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ https://www.8x8.com/products/video-conferencing https://www.8x8.com/products/video-conferencing It looks pretty similar from the description and screenshots. But with more of an enterprisey-focus and integration with their existing software.

233 points by davidjnelson 7y ago

I love Jitsi, before Covid19 I never used it, now I use it daily for calls with family and yesterday I watched a video of our 4x4 trip with friends together with them (5 guys), streaming it from YouTube into the group chat. It worked very well.

Freak_NL 7y ago
We tried Jitsi Meet as a back-up for Google Meet in our company for the daily scrum, and it works great. The only nit-pick is the Firefox performance bug, but it's not too demanding to use Chromium for now just for Jitsi Meet until that bug gets fixed. My colleagues loved the Youtube playback ability (I put on some elevator muzak waiting for the rest to join), although I had to do a bit of hunting to get rid of the video again. :)
- stock_toaster 7y ago
  Seems chrome is the only supported browser[1]? Doesn't this make jitsi meet _effectively_ chrome only until they better support firefox/safari/etc[2]. [1]: I get "It looks like you're using a browser we don't fully support....We recommend to try with the latest version of Chrome or Chromium" when trying to use it. [2]: Sounds like webrtc isn't well supported and fairly buggy for some browsers, apparently?
  - Freak_NL 7y ago
    Firefox works as well, but performance issues may arise when the number of participants increases. I've used Jitsi Meet with Firefox, and its fine one-on-one.
  - gwd 7y ago
    In a previous discussion on HN about Jitsi, it was claimed that Firefox was missing some key aspect of the WebRTC standard that made sending video to multiple people more efficient; and that if a single person in the conference was using Firefox, the result would be a lot more CPU utilization for everyone. So it "works" on Firefox, but the experience will be degraded when scaling up to more users. Hopefully FF can prioritize this feature now that the entire world needs high-quality video conferences on a regular basis.
  - tasqa 7y ago
    For more info check the Github issue with links to relevant issues in firefox bugtracker: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
  - jboynyc 7y ago
    I use it in Firefox all the time with no difficulties. The only thing that doesn't work for me is selecting an external (USB PnP) microphone, but apparently that's due to a longstanding bug in Firefox that Jitsi is doing its best to work around.

saghul 7y ago

Note that this article is about the legacy Jitsi desktop application, and NOT about Jitsi Meet, the WebRTC compatible video conferencing project. Source: I'm a Jitsi dev.

globular-toast 7y ago
That's good to know. Apparently "Jitsi" was evaluated at my company before I joined but now I'm wondering whether it was the desktop project or Jitsi Meet. Are they strictly desktop and Web-based, respectively?
- saghul 7y ago
  They are completely different projects. Jitsi (desktop) was a multi-protocol desktop client whicch supported SIP, XMPP, IRC, etc. At one point in time it gained the hability to do multi-party video conferencing, where one participant would become the "focus" and forward everyone's video to everyone else. This was the inception of the concept of an SFU or Selective Forwarding Unit. Then, in order to scale this up the SFU was extrated to a standalone project: Jitsi Videobridge. Roughly around then, WebRTC became a thing and Jitsi was already doing many of the required things to bring the experience to the web, so work continued with Jitsi Meet, a WebRTC compatible video conferencing system. Jitsi Meet is our present and future, but Jitsi (desktop) lives on both as pieces of the puzzle (Jitsi Videobriidge, Jigasi and Jicofo use parts of it) and as a community project, where people interested in keeping it alive ssubmit fixes / improvements.
  - manishsharan 7y ago
    quick question : is the videobridge a multiplexer -- that is all the clients send the webrtc stream to Videobridge and it combines and forwards the streams to the clients ? Or is it signalling server(STUN) and the clients forward streams to each other ? I am asking this as to decide if I could host the videobridge on on home network (video output from multiple clients would be a problem) or if I have to host this on a cloud ?

kolp 7y ago

I've installed my own instance of Jitsi and it's particularly useful for video chats with older people or those less technically able. My use case is elderly in-laws who can use a laptop, but are incapable of installing anything other than malware. Installing Zoom would be too complicated for them and would probably discourage them from participating in a family video chat. With Jitsi, I send them a link by email and text them to check their email. They click on the link, browser opens and voila! - they're able to chat with their family, with zero fuss. Costs me €2.49 per month for a Hetzner cloud instance.

notechback 7y ago
Hi, this is really interesting for me. Could you share a bit more details of your setup?
- reitzensteinm 7y ago
  I am also doing this, so I'll take the liberty of answering. There's a turnkey docker which should take a few minutes to install: https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet Put nginx in front of it with Let's Encrypt and it shouldn't take more than half an hour to set up. After that you basically get a clone of meet.jit.si. I'm using it with the low level JS library in order to build a product that contains video chat. There was a bit more messing about for me, but only a bit.
  - olieidel 7y ago
    nginx and letsencrypt are already included in the docker image - just uncomment the letsencrypt variables in the .env config file :) hope that saves you some time.
    - reitzensteinm 7y ago
      Ah of course, I forgot that was included. I couldn't use that myself due to CORS and a few other things but if you just want Jitsi in a box it would work for sure.

amrx101 7y ago

I have yet to figure out how to 1. how to share screen? 2. How to schedule meet for future? Maybe I am dumb. I will meanwhile stick to Zoom.

distances 7y ago
What do you mean with the schedule point? You tell everyone when to join, they join, meeting starts. The rooms exists when someone is in there, you don't need to open them at a certain time.
- vetinari 7y ago
  Also, there's a thing called "calendar". One can send invitation for a specific time (via another cutting edge tech, "email"), and include an URL to the meeting. Some people even like the fact, that they have their scheduling info in the same place! Isn't the technology wonderful? /s
fsh 7y ago
For screen sharing simply click on the "Share your screen" button in the bottom left corner.

k__ 7y ago

Is Jitsi the OSS Zoom killer? I saw many tweets about it today... Edit: Seems like Jitsi Meet is the current contender.

mhugo 7y ago
Please someone correct me, but my understanding is that Jitsi meet has a very different architecture compared to Zoom. Jitsi Meet uses a "SFU" which means the A/V stream of each participant is sent to all the others. That basically does not scale in terms of network bandwidth. Zoom seems to use a central server that kind of "mix" streams and send them to all participants. Or something hybrid. Jitsi could be able to connect to an "MCU" like OpenMCU for this kind of architecture, but I have no clue if it is easy or not to deploy. I am working in a full-remote company with ~15 people. Jitsi is ok for meetings with 2-4 people. With more people, it just does not work reliably. Zoom does.
- k__ 7y ago
  True. Half-OT, but couldn't this be solved somehow by relaying?
- janinge 7y ago
  Zoom also use the Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) architecture. Or a central server that kind of "mix" streams and send them to all participants, if you will. Jitsi Videobridge does this by receiving simulcast streams from each participant. This server individually picks out streams and qualities that will fit in each recipient's downstream pipe based on measured bandwidth and configured priorities (e.g. you could choose to give more bandwidth to those who are actively speaking, or shut down all but the last N speakers video streams). Yes, the available network bandwith on a Jitsi Videobridge could be a bottleneck. Each meeting need to fit on a single bridge instance. However, using common servers connected at 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps, it shouldn't be any problem to have meetings with substantially more than 2-4 people. Say a HD stream from most webcameras outputs 3 Mbps at full blast, with 50% overhead due to the simulcasting. That's over 2000 participants on a single server connected at 10 Gbps, all receiving all video streams in full quality. For meetings with 2 participants the streams run peer to peer, so here you get the best possible latency and quality. We've set up Jitsi on a VPS instance at a nearby provider, and have not seen any problems with meetings of 10-15 people. Stability and performance also outperforms all the other solutions I've tried. There's currently a bug in Firefox's simulcast implementation, so if you have any participant using this browser, this feature gets disabled for everyone. Even with this issue, I haven't noticed anything but excellent performance with this few number of participants. The following article might also be interesting. https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-vs-zoom-video-quality/ https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-vs-zoom-video-quality/

leonroy 7y ago

Here's the Jitsi architecture: https://i.imgur.com/oDSRzF4.png https://i.imgur.com/oDSRzF4.png Screen grabbed from their excellent tutorial videos: https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/ https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/ One thing we’ve found in deploying Jitsi several times is that good performance is difficult to achieve across parties who are across the globe. We have some of our team in Armenia, Belarus and London and not all of then get consistent performance. I know you can do geographic sharding so all EU or US guests get connected to their closest server but is there a way to ensure cross country participants all get good performance?

supermatt 7y ago
You can either: - have the SFU (videobridge) in a more "central" location - have multiple videobridge installations (cascaded bridges) where required with a low latency interconnect (its effectively a smart relay). - you could use geographically distributed forced TURN servers with low latency interconnect to the SFU, but it would be more bandwidth intensive, and not really useful unless you truly have a REALLY low latency interconnect. ---------- Reducing the quality of the streams may also help, if it is bandwidth that is the constraining factor.

bronco21016 7y ago

I spent a ton of time looking at Jitsi yesterday because I’m getting fed up with FaceTime. I really want a living room solution on my large flatscreen because we’ve been spending loads of time doing extended video chats (30+ minutes) with family members. Stuff like family trivia night, etc. The iPhone/iPad screens are too small and really its a pain to hold it in place. I’ve been using a tripod to help some with the holding but the fixed lens is really limiting without an extended HDMI cord. I’ve been connecting to the TV via HDMI but the sound/input is still via the device and the iPhone refuses to do landscape mode. Overall, it’s just suboptimal. Jitsi is open source, has an option for me to host my own server (avid self-hoster for privacy), and appears to work on just about any platform. So I should be able to get most of the family to adopt it. So now I suppose my question is how do I get Jitsi running on my TV? Or can someone offer some other solution that might fit my use case? I really would like to be able to just go to my TV, turn it on, and have instant ability to video chat from my living room to family members on nearly any device. My first thought was to get it running on an Raspberry Pi but it seems that’s not really something that works from all of my searching. Does anyone have any experience there? If that’s the case is there a cheap Android device that could achieve this with some sort of decent camera? Or am I stuck running an x86 system attached to my TV? Does anyone else have Jitsi setup in a conference room like setting with a TV?

choward 7y ago
> Or am I stuck running an x86 system attached to my TV? I'm curious why you're opposed to this.
- bronco21016 7y ago
  Primarily price and power consumption. Having the ability to run something like this on a cheap ARM single board computer would be significantly cheaper. Plus, I have a stack of Raspberry Pis in my office. Who knows how long it would take to order and receive a small form factor x86 system right now.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dvduval 7y ago

What about the cost in terms of per per person per hour?

avmich 7y ago

Outstandingly, by modern standards, clean HTML page, markup-wise. Great content, too.

dmix 7y ago

I noticed Jitsi was purchased by 8x8 in 2018, I'm curious how they're video conferencing software differs from https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ https://www.8x8.com/products/video-conferencing https://www.8x8.com/products/video-conferencing It looks pretty similar from the description and screenshots. But with more of an enterprisey-focus and integration with their existing software.