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I've been playing with a custom install of Jitsi Meet for the last few days. It was very easy to setup. I'm kind of fearing trying to deploy it in my company.
by moron4hire 7y ago
I've been playing with a custom install of Jitsi Meet for the last few days. It was very easy to setup.
I'm kind of fearing trying to deploy it in my company. This has nothing to do with Jitsi Meet and everything to do with the shitshow that is WebRTC in browsers.
I can't find any desktop browsers that use the available GPU for hardware accelerated video encoding. Chromium (Google and Edge) says it's "only available on Chrome OS and Android". Firefox has a flag with no scare-provisos, but I've been unable to tell if it's had any effect.
By default, every browser on my system was setup to prefer the Intel UHD GPU. I've got an NVidia GeForce RTX 2080 in this laptop. Why not use that?
One of the reasons is that all the browsers have a software-rendering blacklist for certain combos of OS/hardware/drivers. There are rare cases where errant WebGL code can cause a full system crash on (checks notes) Android. So if you're one of the unlucky many who have these combos, but also an operating system smart enough to put graphics drivers into userland, you're taking the fast-train to turning your laptop into a blow-dryer. So they tend to take the Intel GPU over the NVidia GPU because apparently Intel's hardware+drivers isn't as buggy.
You can override it in the hidden settings, which means nobody overrides it.
All of this is to say, you could have a very powerful computer and still have very poor WebRTC performance.
- zapttt 7y agolearn to buy hardware with decent drivers. hint: it's not nvidia.
- quadrangle 7y agoDoes this explain why I get poor Jitsi experience on my laptop and better using the Android app on my phone?? I suspect you are hitting on the exact issue I'm having. I have a Thinkpad with just the Intel 5500 GPU, nothing superb. So, how do I figure out if at least that is being used or not?
- moron4hire 7y agoWindows Task Manager will show you GPU utilization on the Performance tab. Start Task Manager, then start your browser and see if there is an uptick. Then start a meeting to see if there is another one. There probably won't be. Then, disable the software rendering override in your browser: (Firefox: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers#How_to_force-enable_blocked_graphics_features https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...) (Chrome: https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable-webgl-in-my-browser https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable-webg...) and test again. Probably need to restart the browser after the change in settings.
- quadrangle 7y agoWhy would you assume I'm on Windows? I'm on GNU/Linux here. But anyway, yes, I see specifically an uptick in the CPU dramatically with meetings, distinct from other browsing.
- oever 7y agoWhat's the setting for hardware video encoding in Firefox? media.webrtc.hw.h264.enabled or media.webrtc.platformencoder?
- moron4hire 7y agoon closer inspection it looks like media.webrtc.hw.h264.enabled is for decoding and media.webrtc.platformencoder is for encoding on Android :(
- zajio1am 7y agoI also had very bad experience with WebRTC in browsers. Just several days ago i tried videoconference with Jitsi Meet. Although it was receive only (no camera or mic), so no encoding, and received video was pretty low-res, it generated enough load on all my cores that after a while it triggered thermal throttling. Considering that i can play Full-HD H.264 videos with minimal load then this seems ridiculous.