5 ms·

Hangouts etc are using webrtc, but p2p doesn't scale beyond a few participants.

koolba 7y ago
Not even to a standard 20-30 person class size? Surely there’s enough bidirectional bandwidth for a continuous audio feed and a token based video feed.
- detaro 7y ago
  In my experience, WebRTC peer-to-peer solutions often struggle keeping a room of 15 in a state that everyone can hear everyone else. Many upstream connections are tiny, and the p2p session management tricks to get through NAT slightly wonky. And NYC is going to have many students with only a mobile phone plan or similarly bad internet (and a bunch with no internet at all, but that's another discussion). Efficient is important.
  - fock 7y ago
    did you ever try it with such a real low bandwidth connection? I somehow doubt that it's really that nice to transmit WQHD desktops as is... Also I don't really get the thing about a 30 person, all hands video-conference. The only thing coming out of that (on the average 1080p screen) is gratifying the host: "all these people show up, because of meeee" (and yeah, school kids could do whatever they want in an audio conference. but kids can do that also with zoom (unless you are spying on them with the integrated spyware...) and they also can sit through one session and then replay their face all the time...
    - detaro 7y ago
      How does "P2P can't even maintain audio for large-ish groups in my experience" translate to "transmitting WQHD desktops"? One of the large strengths of tools like Zoom over the typical WebRTC-P2P thing is that they can avoid exactly that, and e.g. maintain a stable audio only (or extremely low-quality video) conference for people on slow connections.
      - fock 7y ago
        I suppose you can stop transmission of all video in jitsi as well (or at least it should be possible, given that it supports landline dial-in as well)? low quality video of heads is not that interesting for me personally (and for all purposes except keeping a literal headcount).
        detaro 7y ago
        Jitsi is not an example of a peer-to-peer system for group calls. The default UI doesn't expose that many configuration options for this sadly from what I've heard.
- viraptor 7y ago
  From zoom requirements for webinar with video feed: (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-Requirements-for-PC-Mac-and-Linux https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-R...) 50-150kbps (down) That's 4.5Mbps of stable upload required from the presenter. This requires at least ASL2+ and not everyone will be able to reach it. So it's relatively common, but can't really be expected.

Not even to a standard 20-30 person class size? Surely there’s enough bidirectional bandwidth for a continuous audio feed and a token based video feed.

detaro 7y ago
In my experience, WebRTC peer-to-peer solutions often struggle keeping a room of 15 in a state that everyone can hear everyone else. Many upstream connections are tiny, and the p2p session management tricks to get through NAT slightly wonky. And NYC is going to have many students with only a mobile phone plan or similarly bad internet (and a bunch with no internet at all, but that's another discussion). Efficient is important.
- fock 7y ago
  did you ever try it with such a real low bandwidth connection? I somehow doubt that it's really that nice to transmit WQHD desktops as is... Also I don't really get the thing about a 30 person, all hands video-conference. The only thing coming out of that (on the average 1080p screen) is gratifying the host: "all these people show up, because of meeee" (and yeah, school kids could do whatever they want in an audio conference. but kids can do that also with zoom (unless you are spying on them with the integrated spyware...) and they also can sit through one session and then replay their face all the time...
  - detaro 7y ago
    How does "P2P can't even maintain audio for large-ish groups in my experience" translate to "transmitting WQHD desktops"? One of the large strengths of tools like Zoom over the typical WebRTC-P2P thing is that they can avoid exactly that, and e.g. maintain a stable audio only (or extremely low-quality video) conference for people on slow connections.
    - fock 7y ago
      I suppose you can stop transmission of all video in jitsi as well (or at least it should be possible, given that it supports landline dial-in as well)? low quality video of heads is not that interesting for me personally (and for all purposes except keeping a literal headcount).
      - detaro 7y ago
        Jitsi is not an example of a peer-to-peer system for group calls. The default UI doesn't expose that many configuration options for this sadly from what I've heard.
viraptor 7y ago
From zoom requirements for webinar with video feed: (https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-Requirements-for-PC-Mac-and-Linux https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-R...) 50-150kbps (down) That's 4.5Mbps of stable upload required from the presenter. This requires at least ASL2+ and not everyone will be able to reach it. So it's relatively common, but can't really be expected.