16 ms·

Jitsi Meet features update

628 points by jrepinc 7y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Seems a decent bunch of improvements; sharing system audio is apparently a useful feature (I don't care, but I see it mentioned enough), and device and muting changes are nice usability improvements.
- acidburnNSA 7y ago
  Agreed. Glad they're adding things at this kind of reasonable pace. In the linux philosophy there are other things that can do the audio sharing (like Pulseaudio loopback modules) but I guess no one should have to learn those in order to use the simple feature in this tool.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    It's also a cross-platform tool, so it might make sense to do their own thing that works everywhere.
  - rjsw 7y ago
    Or just add audio and video sharing to systemd. /s
AndyMcConachie 7y ago
I hope this crisis causes Jitsi to get some serious funding. I've been trying Jitsi on and off for about 6 years and it's never been this good. It also could be a lot better.
- brightball 7y ago
  Me too. I'm really loving everything that I see from the project
- alharith 7y ago
  Just to offer a counter point: this crisis feels mostly manufactured. Zoom is under a microscope that almost all other comm software would fail just as horribly, if not worse. Maybe the majority of users here were too young to remember, but Skype was far, far worse, and did not have same positive response and seriousness Zoom seems to be having. That said, competition and alternatives is good!
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Skype used to be flawless until Microsoft decided to get rid of the P2P model and replace beautiful native clients with an Electron pile of crap.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      Not sure it was quite flawless, but it has gone from being my first-choice platform to last place. I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path, post-acquisition.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        > I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path, post-acquisition. While I'm sure it could be made worse, I didn't exactly hear anything good about LinkedIn pre-aquisition, either.
        gnicholas 7y ago
        Fair point. The most noticeable difference so far has been the hardening of the login wall.
    - CrankyBear 7y ago
      I remember that version of Skype and flawless wasn't the word I'd use for it. Buggy and insecure as hell are what come to my mind.
      - 7y ago
- troyvit 7y ago
  I tried to find a place to contribute on their site but it seems they are fully funded by 8 & 8.
- bisby 7y ago
  I agree. I've been just waiting for a use case for jitsi (the woes of social tools, is there is no use if there is no remote party willing) for years. I love when open source options are valid options. After all the zoom privacy/security nightmare stuff, we've started looking at alternatives, but we have a set of features we need that either aren't in Jitsi or we couldn't figure them out. So in the mean time we've been stuck with zoom. * breakout rooms * annotations on screenshare (being able to draw on the presenter's screen) * something other than dropbox for exporting recordings There may be other shortcomings, but we'd be willing to "downgrade" except for these that leave management going "well, i guess we'll just deal with the security issues of zoom rather than lose features"
  - guerby 7y ago
    https://bigbluebutton.org/ https://bigbluebutton.org/ is free software, has breakout rooms, collaborative drawing on slides, synchronized playing of youtube and a few other features. Works quite well in my experience.
dvduval 7y ago
What is the approximate bandwidth cost per user per hour?
- maelito 7y ago
  Probably depends on your connection
  - dvduval 7y ago
    Isn't there a cost for bandwidth for the server where you have it installed?
- multiplegeorges 7y ago
  This depends entirely on the quality of the video sent.
- saghul 7y ago
  Jitsi will use up to 2.5Mbps for the user "on stage" (the large view) and about 200Kbps for each thumbnail. You can use these numbers and your usual conference size to calculate how much data you'd use and then calculate the cost of that.
- mlinksva 7y ago
  I wonder if there is anything published about meet.jit.si's use, traffic and costs (as well as scaling issues, solutions)? I imagine that it all of these have increased a lot over the last weeks, and it's pretty impressive that the entirely free and non-monetized (AFAICT) service has remained up and without problems (AFAIK).
electriclove 7y ago
Sharing system audio sounds great! I'm hoping this makes using things like Jackbox better.
- sheidavanesa 7y ago
  ok
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- miloignis 7y ago
  Awesome new feature! That's exactly what I'm going to use it for, though I am just a tad sad that it happened before my setup game night, as I felt like a wizard using pulseaudio to route the game audio through as a microphone...
- fidel100 7y ago
  I gave it a try today but couldn't get it working. I tried both Firefox and Chrome (in which seems to offer more features). Any help?
darkwater 7y ago
Nice to hear about the simplified device chooser, I used Jitsi a few days ago for the first time for a family call and I lost like 2 minutes to realize where to change the mic input.
ce4 7y ago
They also ask for translations at the bottom of the release notes. It's a bit unusual though that most of the time the translation project on weblate is locked, but i haven't seen any vandalism
jxcl 7y ago
I read somewhere that they were working on better Firefox support. Is there any associated timeline with that?
- xd1936 7y ago
  https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
- multiplegeorges 7y ago
  Much of the hold up is Firefox's lack of simulcast support. There are a few tracking tickets in Bugzilla for that effort.
  - xd1936 7y ago
    What is the alternative that Google Meet, Zoom's web client, etc use?
sandGorgon 7y ago
i just hope WebRTC Insertable Streams spec matures 10x faster now - https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552 . True end-to-end video conferencin privacy through the browser! This is the time when its truly needed. Firefox, Chrome and Edge should just sit in a room and not come out till its done.
- bilal4hmed 7y ago
  also Safari
  - capableweb 7y ago
    Apple has proven with previous actions and non-investments in the web platform that they are not interested in contributing to something like that and would rather focus on their own proprietary services/applications. Right now, they seem to be doing the bare minimum to not receive too much criticism from developers who are stuck on Apple devices.
    - maxwell 7y ago
      Hence the antitrust investigation. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG-116-JU05-20190716-SD036.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...
      - capableweb 7y ago
        I hadn't seen that before, thanks for sharing. First question: "Does Apple permit iPhone users to uninstall Safari? If yes, please describe the steps a user would need to take in order to do so. If no, please explain why not" Apple answers that users cannot, and adds: "The App Store provides Apple’s users with access to third party apps, including web browsers. Browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and others are available for users to download" While forgetting to mention that all "Apple's policies require all iOS apps that browse the web to use the iOS built-in iOS WebKit-based rendering framework and WebKit JavaScript" [https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/], effectively meaning it's just a skin on top of WebKit, which is controlled by Apple. I wish something good comes out of that investigation, but realistically, I don't see it happening.
maxired 7y ago
I am actually working on a Jitsi meet fork dedicated to agile Team https://meet.retrolution.co/ https://meet.retrolution.co/ So far I added features such as Poker planning and post is drawing. Any feedback welcome ;-)
- baco 7y ago
  Where is the source code available?
- 1over137 7y ago
  Why fork? Did they not want your patches?
  - maxired 7y ago
    Good question ;-). I actually did not asked, coz I want for now to have the freedom to experiment and break things.
- nfc 7y ago
  Hi, I think there could be some synergies between what I'm working on and what you are doing. Couldn't find a way to contact you other than Twitter or LinkedIn, if you want to have a talk my email is in my profile :)
  - maxired 7y ago
    done ;-)
huskyr 7y ago
I'm impressed with Jitsi, it all works pretty well. The only thing i noticed, compared to some of the proprietary solutions, is that my laptop got pretty hot because of CPU usage. I wonder if they're doing anything about that for the next release.
- ViViDboarder 7y ago
  Which ones don’t? I get the same behavior from Slack, Lifesize, Hangouts Meet, and Zoom.
  - huskyr 7y ago
    Videoconferencing definitely takes a lot of CPU, but i haven't seen the same 'my laptop feels like a washing machine' with Hangouts and Zoom...
- fsh 7y ago
  Jitsi simply forwards the video streams between users, whereas some proprietary services seem to re-encode everything into a single stream. So in a large conference each client might have to deal with decoding dozens of high-resolution streams. This is probably very difficult to solve without reducing video quality.
  - huskyr 7y ago
    Ah, i didn't know that. Seems to make sense why Jitsi takes more CPU then.
evolvedlight 7y ago
I started using this (for https://virtualcoffeebreak.app https://virtualcoffeebreak.app) but in the end had to switch to daily.co - the jitsi support for mobile devices is a bit painful and doesn't work so well. The mobile iframe is quite jarring and doesn't provide that nice user experience; for example it doesn't detect if the app is already installed or not. Having to download an app increases the barrier compared to other solutions.
jka 7y ago
Random fact: the 'Big Buck Bunny'[1] short film that the presenter shares during the screen-and-audio-sharing demo was made by the Blender Foundation[2], an organization that develops open and free content creation tools. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny [2] - https://blender.org/foundation/ https://blender.org/foundation/
- saghul 7y ago
  I didn't choose it at random ;-)
  - jordigh 7y ago
    BBB has kind of become the Lena of video testing, but I've always been more partial to Sintel myself. https://durian.blender.org/download/ https://durian.blender.org/download/
CrankyBear 7y ago
I want to like Jitsi, but I can't. I've been testing it out on a variety of servers, bare-metal and cloud with Debian and CentOS. Regardless of platform, it doesn't scale, it eats memory like peanuts, and can saturate even 10GbE network connections. The service, as opposed to the server, clearly works well. But, the service doesn't have anything like the load that Zoom, Teams, Hangouts, etc. must deal with.
- _-___________-_ 7y ago
  I've been helping quite a few people set up Jitsi lately. The software works reasonably well, although documentation is lacking and a lot of configuration options are named terribly, but one thing I've noticed is people's expectations about bandwidth usage are way lower than actuality, especially outbound from the server. But a bit of napkin math suggests that Jitsi isn't doing anything fundamentally inefficient here; one high-res stream plus N low-res streams transmitted to N participants is just a lot of bandwidth.
  - nemoniac 7y ago
    Please tell us what the config options should be.
    - _-___________-_ 7y ago
      Config options for what?
      - BrowserMeeting 7y ago
        lol. Seriously, for what?
  - olgs 7y ago
    This is so very true. We have been monitoring the bandwidth, CPU and mempools of our small Jitsi Meet instance living on an ESXi VM on a Mac Mini. We notice that 3-4 participants typically consume 5-7mbps downstream to the server and about 5mbps upstream from the server while CPU usage stay in the 15-20% range. The bandwidth scales fairly quickly with the number of participants, especially on phone type devices.
tasty_freeze 7y ago
Over the past three weeks I've tried a few different conferencing solutions, including jitsi. I'll give it another try with this update. My use case is I take weekly music lessons, and now they are virtual. The problem is the DSP done on audio was designed for speech. If my teacher is explaining something then plays an example on his bass, it usually sounds terrible, maybe even inaudible. I send him pre-recorded mp3s of cover songs; ideally he could listen to it and I could comment in real time about places where things could be improved. Instead, if he is playing any music on his system, I hear nothing -- no music, no talk. It seems like the software thinks "Hey, this participant is listening to non-conference audio, so I'll just mute him (at least on skype). I'd love there to be a half duplex audio button so none of the DSP shenanigans are needed, and a high quality audio stream would be sent.
- jpdus 7y ago
  On Zoom you can activate raw, non-preprocessed sound. (I never tried it and don't know whether it works well for music)
  - xiii1408 7y ago
    Awesome! I've been wondering how to do this, since I normally take calls in a quiet room with headphones, so there's no need for noise canceling. It would be nice if you could enable this on a per-call basis, though.
    - cpeterso 7y ago
      Here is how to enable this Zoom feature ("Preserve Original Sound"): https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Preserve-Original-Sound https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Prese...
  - TheDesolate0 7y ago
    Bear (rar!) in mind this will only work if you have the uplink bandwidth to do so.
thomcrowe 7y ago
I moved to Jitsi a few weeks ago and have been really pleased. Getting people not used to video conferencing on an in-browser call is much simpler
MayeulC 7y ago
I had a look at contributing to jitsi, starting with translations for their mobile app, but the CLA turned me away. I really dislike those things. However, I like the product they are building. Keep it up! I hope the firefox issues will soon be a thing of the past (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=substring&status_whiteboard=jitsi-meet https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...)
intsunny 7y ago
I wish jitsi supported mobile browsers. People get really turned off at having to install yet another video conferencing app (YAVCA).
- smichel17 7y ago
  If you enable desktop mode, it'll with (in mobile Firefox, at least). ...but not well. I can see why they disable it by default, even if I wish they included a button to proceed anyway.
rodolphoarruda 7y ago
Passing by just to say I <3 Jitsi. (being a user for no more than a month now) That pop-up alert that tells you that you are speaking while on mute is incredibly smart.
- allset_ 7y ago
  Google Meets has this as well, don't Zoom and others?
  - rodolphoarruda 7y ago
    I don't know. I've never seen the feature in other products.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - amai 7y ago
    I have seen it only on Microsoft Teams. Google Meets doesn't seem to have this feature. But maybe the availability depends on the browser/OS combination?
- ryukafalz 7y ago
  The two alerts that I’ve seen on Jitsi recently that really impressed me were: no signal from your mic for a while when you’re unmuted (I had mine hardware muted so this was expected) and background noise from your mic. I use Google Meet regularly for work and I wish it had both of those.
bArray 7y ago
I've trialed several video conferencing apps in the last few weeks (Skype, Zoom, Hangouts and others), Jitsi Meet is the only one I've been able to have a video call on with my low-bandwidth, high-ping network. They've done a superb job for my use-case, I'm very happy with the result.
reader_1000 7y ago
When I tried Jitsi with my family friends, some of them struggled to use it since they don't know English. So I think changing the language can be easier for nonspeakers of English. For example, language select box can be placed next to "Go" button (when creating meeting) and next to info button in the meeting. Also using "Accept-Language" HTTP header for choosing the language can be a good default. Another option is to add a language query parameter to the URL so that host can easily share meeting with a particular language. Also if it would be great if some improvements can be made for low bandwitdh since there are people with slow connections and limited data plans. (On the other hand, there is already an option to lower video quality). Other than that, kudos to Jitsi team for their great efforts and this great project.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  The very last item in the blog post says > Updated translations So it seems like they've been working on this.
  - reader_1000 7y ago
    I think that work is for improving quality and quantity of translations which is also good.
ejo4041 7y ago
Does anyone know how their releases correspond to version numbers? It looks like they are possibly releasing multiple times a day, or maybe using releases and tags in a non-standard way. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases
- ejo4041 7y ago
  I guess I see the release number appended to the end in these: https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/windows/ https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/windows/
- BGZq7 7y ago
  Not sure I completely understand it, but Jenkins is apparently auto-tagging things (maybe every commit that passes tests?). I think their actual releases have "stable" in the tag and release name, so "current" is "stable/jitsi-meet_4384". 4384 matches the latest versions I'm seeing for Ubuntu and Debian at https://jitsi.org/downloads/ https://jitsi.org/downloads/ under "Jitsi Desktop stable build line". For some reason other OSes seem to be much further behind.
znpy 7y ago
The banner complaining about not using google chrome (or derivative) is immensely annoying. I am using it on firefox and it works anyway, but now my mom is being forced to use it for work and she's asking whether there are any problems (there aren't). they should just take it away already, it's working well anyway.
- lima 7y ago
  This is not true, the whole conference performs significantly worse at much higher bandwidth usage if there is a Firefox client, due to implementation limitations.
  - keidjfks 7y ago
    In other words, your experience might be good with Firefox, but it's worse for the others.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Their documentations and many other places state that Firefox uses roughly 2x the amount of resources, so I think it's worth pointing that to the user if they are having resource issues.
- walljm 7y ago
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600698 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600698 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 document the performance issues. Mozilla is working on the issue, but its not yet resolved.
- DenseComet 7y ago
  There are known issues with Firefox clients causing deteriorated quality for all users. They're working on it, but current workarounds are use Chromium, a chromium based browser, or the desktop app. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
spsphulse 7y ago
I’ve been using Jitsi for a couple of weeks and my experience has been pretty good so far. Got a quick question if someone can answer. Is is some how possible to use OBS stream with Jitsi? For my use case, I work with an one MS-Excel window capture & my webcam input capture in the corner, to explain some concepts to my students. Any help appreciated.
- seedie 7y ago
  For Linux and Windows yes. There are plugins that can create a virtual cam https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568#issuecomment-603615980 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568#issueco...
- saghul 7y ago
  It should work fine, since it would create a virtual webcam. Please drop by https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5425 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5425 if you run into issues.
- luxpir 7y ago
  Just posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804804
dstryr 7y ago
I am so happy Jitsi exists. My friends and I have a room that we regularly pop into to say hi or play games together. The mobile app I downloaded through F-Droid works incredibly well, and for those of you Firefox users who aren't having the best experience, I recommend using the Electron desktop app [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases]. I've been using the Jitsi Electron app in conjunction with OBS + the VirtualCam plugin to share games, videos and my desktop. Hopefully I can convert more Zoom users.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Sandstorm.io community members host weekly meetings on Jitsi and have for a few months. It's not perfect, but it works and it's open source, and that's great. I will say the audio on a computer is a bit hit and miss, I often opt to dial in with my phone instead, which works pretty solidly. A really nice perk is that you can have your room name URL, and the dial in number is the same for that URL, so if you reuse the same "room", you can just know the meeting ID and all, which I haven't really seen from other solutions.
k__ 7y ago
I used the hosted Jitsi Meet service. Worked really well. It was just sad that they favored Chrome over Firefox.
- sleepless 7y ago
  It's a bit amazing that now that the public attention is here, work is starting to improve Firefox after it was neglected for many years.
nhumrich 7y ago
I want to like jitsi, but have yet to use it without participants in the meeting having issues. It doesn't remember hardware selection, so if the default hardware is incorrect, you have to change it every time. Often people arent able to see video, or hear audio. If people aren't using headsets, then the audio from their speaker loops and causes feedback. Its always been painful for everyone. But everyone else seems to love it, so what am I doing wrong? (Running in gcp, fwiw)
- porjo 7y ago
  I just did a quick test using latest Jitsi meet running in Chrome and it does remember my external webcam settings (saved to browser localStorage). Looping audio is something that happens on alternative platforms too, so I'm not sure that's a fair criticism of Jitsi.
293984j29384 7y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how complicated it is to add authentication to Jitsi meet. I ended up following a guide I found on their website it wasn't trivial.
- sbassi 7y ago
  can you please tell me with guide you used? I need to implement Google authentication for a domain that is using Gsuite. Will appreciate any help.
  - loyukfai 7y ago
    Ditto.
    - 293984j29384 7y ago
      https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain
      - loyukfai 7y ago
        Thanks!
  - 293984j29384 7y ago
    I followed the guide below but I'm not sure if that'll be helpful for you. https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain
orthecreedence 7y ago
When I first saw Jitsi a few days ago, I thought "there's an open-source, p2p, e2e encrypted video chat already? Why did Riot build their own?" The next day I figured out that Riot's in-app video chat IS Jitsi. The world made sense again.
spoid 7y ago
I was under the impression that conference calls were not actually e2e encrypted: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet#security https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet#security https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409 Has this changed? In the end you could at least self-host though
- BrowserMeeting 7y ago
  Curious, also. I was under the impression that they were not encrypted with group calls
sbassi 7y ago
I would appreciate any help on how to implement authentication with an external service like a custom domain under Google (Gsuite).
MR4D 7y ago
Why can’t I use this on an iPhone? Would be perfect if I didn’t have to download the app.
loyukfai 7y ago
Wish the next update can improve further the blur background function, right now it consumes quite a lot CPU cycles, and is not supported on the mobile apps. Even better, to support virtual background: https://community.jitsi.org/t/virtual-backgrounds-using-green-screen/31173 https://community.jitsi.org/t/virtual-backgrounds-using-gree... Cheers.
pojntfx 7y ago
The best thing about Jitsi IMHO is that it scales so well. After having problems with Nextcloud Talk, I just wrote a chat bot that returns Jitsi links (see my GitHub if you’re interested) et voilà 100+ people in one conference!
- barbs 7y ago
  Wow. I keep reading that it doesn't scale to those numbers well but it sounds like you have a different experience? Do you enforce participants to use Chromium-based browsers?
BrowserMeeting 7y ago
Impressive to see they are still adding features after all these years. I hope it gets more adoption and gets easier to run a self-hosted version

628 points by jrepinc 7y ago

Seems a decent bunch of improvements; sharing system audio is apparently a useful feature (I don't care, but I see it mentioned enough), and device and muting changes are nice usability improvements.

acidburnNSA 7y ago
Agreed. Glad they're adding things at this kind of reasonable pace. In the linux philosophy there are other things that can do the audio sharing (like Pulseaudio loopback modules) but I guess no one should have to learn those in order to use the simple feature in this tool.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  It's also a cross-platform tool, so it might make sense to do their own thing that works everywhere.
- rjsw 7y ago
  Or just add audio and video sharing to systemd. /s

AndyMcConachie 7y ago

I hope this crisis causes Jitsi to get some serious funding. I've been trying Jitsi on and off for about 6 years and it's never been this good. It also could be a lot better.

brightball 7y ago
Me too. I'm really loving everything that I see from the project
alharith 7y ago
Just to offer a counter point: this crisis feels mostly manufactured. Zoom is under a microscope that almost all other comm software would fail just as horribly, if not worse. Maybe the majority of users here were too young to remember, but Skype was far, far worse, and did not have same positive response and seriousness Zoom seems to be having. That said, competition and alternatives is good!
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Skype used to be flawless until Microsoft decided to get rid of the P2P model and replace beautiful native clients with an Electron pile of crap.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    Not sure it was quite flawless, but it has gone from being my first-choice platform to last place. I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path, post-acquisition.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      > I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path, post-acquisition. While I'm sure it could be made worse, I didn't exactly hear anything good about LinkedIn pre-aquisition, either.
      - gnicholas 7y ago
        Fair point. The most noticeable difference so far has been the hardening of the login wall.
  - CrankyBear 7y ago
    I remember that version of Skype and flawless wasn't the word I'd use for it. Buggy and insecure as hell are what come to my mind.
    - 7y ago
troyvit 7y ago
I tried to find a place to contribute on their site but it seems they are fully funded by 8 & 8.
bisby 7y ago
I agree. I've been just waiting for a use case for jitsi (the woes of social tools, is there is no use if there is no remote party willing) for years. I love when open source options are valid options. After all the zoom privacy/security nightmare stuff, we've started looking at alternatives, but we have a set of features we need that either aren't in Jitsi or we couldn't figure them out. So in the mean time we've been stuck with zoom. * breakout rooms * annotations on screenshare (being able to draw on the presenter's screen) * something other than dropbox for exporting recordings There may be other shortcomings, but we'd be willing to "downgrade" except for these that leave management going "well, i guess we'll just deal with the security issues of zoom rather than lose features"
- guerby 7y ago
  https://bigbluebutton.org/ https://bigbluebutton.org/ is free software, has breakout rooms, collaborative drawing on slides, synchronized playing of youtube and a few other features. Works quite well in my experience.

dvduval 7y ago

What is the approximate bandwidth cost per user per hour?

maelito 7y ago
Probably depends on your connection
- dvduval 7y ago
  Isn't there a cost for bandwidth for the server where you have it installed?
multiplegeorges 7y ago
This depends entirely on the quality of the video sent.
saghul 7y ago
Jitsi will use up to 2.5Mbps for the user "on stage" (the large view) and about 200Kbps for each thumbnail. You can use these numbers and your usual conference size to calculate how much data you'd use and then calculate the cost of that.
mlinksva 7y ago
I wonder if there is anything published about meet.jit.si's use, traffic and costs (as well as scaling issues, solutions)? I imagine that it all of these have increased a lot over the last weeks, and it's pretty impressive that the entirely free and non-monetized (AFAICT) service has remained up and without problems (AFAIK).

electriclove 7y ago

Sharing system audio sounds great! I'm hoping this makes using things like Jackbox better.

sheidavanesa 7y ago
ok
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
miloignis 7y ago
Awesome new feature! That's exactly what I'm going to use it for, though I am just a tad sad that it happened before my setup game night, as I felt like a wizard using pulseaudio to route the game audio through as a microphone...
fidel100 7y ago
I gave it a try today but couldn't get it working. I tried both Firefox and Chrome (in which seems to offer more features). Any help?

darkwater 7y ago

Nice to hear about the simplified device chooser, I used Jitsi a few days ago for the first time for a family call and I lost like 2 minutes to realize where to change the mic input.

ce4 7y ago

They also ask for translations at the bottom of the release notes. It's a bit unusual though that most of the time the translation project on weblate is locked, but i haven't seen any vandalism

jxcl 7y ago

I read somewhere that they were working on better Firefox support. Is there any associated timeline with that?

xd1936 7y ago
https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
multiplegeorges 7y ago
Much of the hold up is Firefox's lack of simulcast support. There are a few tracking tickets in Bugzilla for that effort.
- xd1936 7y ago
  What is the alternative that Google Meet, Zoom's web client, etc use?

sandGorgon 7y ago

i just hope WebRTC Insertable Streams spec matures 10x faster now - https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552 https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552 . True end-to-end video conferencin privacy through the browser! This is the time when its truly needed. Firefox, Chrome and Edge should just sit in a room and not come out till its done.

bilal4hmed 7y ago
also Safari
- capableweb 7y ago
  Apple has proven with previous actions and non-investments in the web platform that they are not interested in contributing to something like that and would rather focus on their own proprietary services/applications. Right now, they seem to be doing the bare minimum to not receive too much criticism from developers who are stuck on Apple devices.
  - maxwell 7y ago
    Hence the antitrust investigation. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG-116-JU05-20190716-SD036.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...
    - capableweb 7y ago
      I hadn't seen that before, thanks for sharing. First question: "Does Apple permit iPhone users to uninstall Safari? If yes, please describe the steps a user would need to take in order to do so. If no, please explain why not" Apple answers that users cannot, and adds: "The App Store provides Apple’s users with access to third party apps, including web browsers. Browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and others are available for users to download" While forgetting to mention that all "Apple's policies require all iOS apps that browse the web to use the iOS built-in iOS WebKit-based rendering framework and WebKit JavaScript" [https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/], effectively meaning it's just a skin on top of WebKit, which is controlled by Apple. I wish something good comes out of that investigation, but realistically, I don't see it happening.

maxired 7y ago

I am actually working on a Jitsi meet fork dedicated to agile Team https://meet.retrolution.co/ https://meet.retrolution.co/ So far I added features such as Poker planning and post is drawing. Any feedback welcome ;-)

baco 7y ago
Where is the source code available?
1over137 7y ago
Why fork? Did they not want your patches?
- maxired 7y ago
  Good question ;-). I actually did not asked, coz I want for now to have the freedom to experiment and break things.
nfc 7y ago
Hi, I think there could be some synergies between what I'm working on and what you are doing. Couldn't find a way to contact you other than Twitter or LinkedIn, if you want to have a talk my email is in my profile :)
- maxired 7y ago
  done ;-)

huskyr 7y ago

I'm impressed with Jitsi, it all works pretty well. The only thing i noticed, compared to some of the proprietary solutions, is that my laptop got pretty hot because of CPU usage. I wonder if they're doing anything about that for the next release.

ViViDboarder 7y ago
Which ones don’t? I get the same behavior from Slack, Lifesize, Hangouts Meet, and Zoom.
- huskyr 7y ago
  Videoconferencing definitely takes a lot of CPU, but i haven't seen the same 'my laptop feels like a washing machine' with Hangouts and Zoom...
fsh 7y ago
Jitsi simply forwards the video streams between users, whereas some proprietary services seem to re-encode everything into a single stream. So in a large conference each client might have to deal with decoding dozens of high-resolution streams. This is probably very difficult to solve without reducing video quality.
- huskyr 7y ago
  Ah, i didn't know that. Seems to make sense why Jitsi takes more CPU then.

evolvedlight 7y ago

I started using this (for https://virtualcoffeebreak.app https://virtualcoffeebreak.app) but in the end had to switch to daily.co - the jitsi support for mobile devices is a bit painful and doesn't work so well. The mobile iframe is quite jarring and doesn't provide that nice user experience; for example it doesn't detect if the app is already installed or not. Having to download an app increases the barrier compared to other solutions.

jka 7y ago

Random fact: the 'Big Buck Bunny'[1] short film that the presenter shares during the screen-and-audio-sharing demo was made by the Blender Foundation[2], an organization that develops open and free content creation tools. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny [2] - https://blender.org/foundation/ https://blender.org/foundation/

saghul 7y ago
I didn't choose it at random ;-)
- jordigh 7y ago
  BBB has kind of become the Lena of video testing, but I've always been more partial to Sintel myself. https://durian.blender.org/download/ https://durian.blender.org/download/

CrankyBear 7y ago

I want to like Jitsi, but I can't. I've been testing it out on a variety of servers, bare-metal and cloud with Debian and CentOS. Regardless of platform, it doesn't scale, it eats memory like peanuts, and can saturate even 10GbE network connections. The service, as opposed to the server, clearly works well. But, the service doesn't have anything like the load that Zoom, Teams, Hangouts, etc. must deal with.

_-___________-_ 7y ago
I've been helping quite a few people set up Jitsi lately. The software works reasonably well, although documentation is lacking and a lot of configuration options are named terribly, but one thing I've noticed is people's expectations about bandwidth usage are way lower than actuality, especially outbound from the server. But a bit of napkin math suggests that Jitsi isn't doing anything fundamentally inefficient here; one high-res stream plus N low-res streams transmitted to N participants is just a lot of bandwidth.
- nemoniac 7y ago
  Please tell us what the config options should be.
  - _-___________-_ 7y ago
    Config options for what?
    - BrowserMeeting 7y ago
      lol. Seriously, for what?
- olgs 7y ago
  This is so very true. We have been monitoring the bandwidth, CPU and mempools of our small Jitsi Meet instance living on an ESXi VM on a Mac Mini. We notice that 3-4 participants typically consume 5-7mbps downstream to the server and about 5mbps upstream from the server while CPU usage stay in the 15-20% range. The bandwidth scales fairly quickly with the number of participants, especially on phone type devices.

tasty_freeze 7y ago

Over the past three weeks I've tried a few different conferencing solutions, including jitsi. I'll give it another try with this update. My use case is I take weekly music lessons, and now they are virtual. The problem is the DSP done on audio was designed for speech. If my teacher is explaining something then plays an example on his bass, it usually sounds terrible, maybe even inaudible. I send him pre-recorded mp3s of cover songs; ideally he could listen to it and I could comment in real time about places where things could be improved. Instead, if he is playing any music on his system, I hear nothing -- no music, no talk. It seems like the software thinks "Hey, this participant is listening to non-conference audio, so I'll just mute him (at least on skype). I'd love there to be a half duplex audio button so none of the DSP shenanigans are needed, and a high quality audio stream would be sent.

jpdus 7y ago
On Zoom you can activate raw, non-preprocessed sound. (I never tried it and don't know whether it works well for music)
- xiii1408 7y ago
  Awesome! I've been wondering how to do this, since I normally take calls in a quiet room with headphones, so there's no need for noise canceling. It would be nice if you could enable this on a per-call basis, though.
  - cpeterso 7y ago
    Here is how to enable this Zoom feature ("Preserve Original Sound"): https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Preserve-Original-Sound https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115003279466-Prese...
- TheDesolate0 7y ago
  Bear (rar!) in mind this will only work if you have the uplink bandwidth to do so.

thomcrowe 7y ago

I moved to Jitsi a few weeks ago and have been really pleased. Getting people not used to video conferencing on an in-browser call is much simpler

MayeulC 7y ago

I had a look at contributing to jitsi, starting with translations for their mobile app, but the CLA turned me away. I really dislike those things. However, I like the product they are building. Keep it up! I hope the firefox issues will soon be a thing of the past (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=substring&status_whiteboard=jitsi-meet https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...)

intsunny 7y ago

I wish jitsi supported mobile browsers. People get really turned off at having to install yet another video conferencing app (YAVCA).

smichel17 7y ago
If you enable desktop mode, it'll with (in mobile Firefox, at least). ...but not well. I can see why they disable it by default, even if I wish they included a button to proceed anyway.

rodolphoarruda 7y ago

Passing by just to say I <3 Jitsi. (being a user for no more than a month now) That pop-up alert that tells you that you are speaking while on mute is incredibly smart.

allset_ 7y ago
Google Meets has this as well, don't Zoom and others?
- rodolphoarruda 7y ago
  I don't know. I've never seen the feature in other products.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- amai 7y ago
  I have seen it only on Microsoft Teams. Google Meets doesn't seem to have this feature. But maybe the availability depends on the browser/OS combination?
ryukafalz 7y ago
The two alerts that I’ve seen on Jitsi recently that really impressed me were: no signal from your mic for a while when you’re unmuted (I had mine hardware muted so this was expected) and background noise from your mic. I use Google Meet regularly for work and I wish it had both of those.

bArray 7y ago

I've trialed several video conferencing apps in the last few weeks (Skype, Zoom, Hangouts and others), Jitsi Meet is the only one I've been able to have a video call on with my low-bandwidth, high-ping network. They've done a superb job for my use-case, I'm very happy with the result.

reader_1000 7y ago

When I tried Jitsi with my family friends, some of them struggled to use it since they don't know English. So I think changing the language can be easier for nonspeakers of English. For example, language select box can be placed next to "Go" button (when creating meeting) and next to info button in the meeting. Also using "Accept-Language" HTTP header for choosing the language can be a good default. Another option is to add a language query parameter to the URL so that host can easily share meeting with a particular language. Also if it would be great if some improvements can be made for low bandwitdh since there are people with slow connections and limited data plans. (On the other hand, there is already an option to lower video quality). Other than that, kudos to Jitsi team for their great efforts and this great project.

ehsankia 7y ago
The very last item in the blog post says > Updated translations So it seems like they've been working on this.
- reader_1000 7y ago
  I think that work is for improving quality and quantity of translations which is also good.

ejo4041 7y ago

Does anyone know how their releases correspond to version numbers? It looks like they are possibly releasing multiple times a day, or maybe using releases and tags in a non-standard way. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases

ejo4041 7y ago
I guess I see the release number appended to the end in these: https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/windows/ https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/windows/
BGZq7 7y ago
Not sure I completely understand it, but Jenkins is apparently auto-tagging things (maybe every commit that passes tests?). I think their actual releases have "stable" in the tag and release name, so "current" is "stable/jitsi-meet_4384". 4384 matches the latest versions I'm seeing for Ubuntu and Debian at https://jitsi.org/downloads/ https://jitsi.org/downloads/ under "Jitsi Desktop stable build line". For some reason other OSes seem to be much further behind.

znpy 7y ago

The banner complaining about not using google chrome (or derivative) is immensely annoying. I am using it on firefox and it works anyway, but now my mom is being forced to use it for work and she's asking whether there are any problems (there aren't). they should just take it away already, it's working well anyway.

lima 7y ago
This is not true, the whole conference performs significantly worse at much higher bandwidth usage if there is a Firefox client, due to implementation limitations.
- keidjfks 7y ago
  In other words, your experience might be good with Firefox, but it's worse for the others.
ehsankia 7y ago
Their documentations and many other places state that Firefox uses roughly 2x the amount of resources, so I think it's worth pointing that to the user if they are having resource issues.
walljm 7y ago
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600698 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600698 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 document the performance issues. Mozilla is working on the issue, but its not yet resolved.
DenseComet 7y ago
There are known issues with Firefox clients causing deteriorated quality for all users. They're working on it, but current workarounds are use Chromium, a chromium based browser, or the desktop app. https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758

spsphulse 7y ago

I’ve been using Jitsi for a couple of weeks and my experience has been pretty good so far. Got a quick question if someone can answer. Is is some how possible to use OBS stream with Jitsi? For my use case, I work with an one MS-Excel window capture & my webcam input capture in the corner, to explain some concepts to my students. Any help appreciated.

seedie 7y ago
For Linux and Windows yes. There are plugins that can create a virtual cam https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568#issuecomment-603615980 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/2568#issueco...
saghul 7y ago
It should work fine, since it would create a virtual webcam. Please drop by https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5425 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5425 if you run into issues.
luxpir 7y ago
Just posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804804

dstryr 7y ago

I am so happy Jitsi exists. My friends and I have a room that we regularly pop into to say hi or play games together. The mobile app I downloaded through F-Droid works incredibly well, and for those of you Firefox users who aren't having the best experience, I recommend using the Electron desktop app [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases]. I've been using the Jitsi Electron app in conjunction with OBS + the VirtualCam plugin to share games, videos and my desktop. Hopefully I can convert more Zoom users.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Sandstorm.io community members host weekly meetings on Jitsi and have for a few months. It's not perfect, but it works and it's open source, and that's great. I will say the audio on a computer is a bit hit and miss, I often opt to dial in with my phone instead, which works pretty solidly. A really nice perk is that you can have your room name URL, and the dial in number is the same for that URL, so if you reuse the same "room", you can just know the meeting ID and all, which I haven't really seen from other solutions.

k__ 7y ago

I used the hosted Jitsi Meet service. Worked really well. It was just sad that they favored Chrome over Firefox.

sleepless 7y ago
It's a bit amazing that now that the public attention is here, work is starting to improve Firefox after it was neglected for many years.

nhumrich 7y ago

I want to like jitsi, but have yet to use it without participants in the meeting having issues. It doesn't remember hardware selection, so if the default hardware is incorrect, you have to change it every time. Often people arent able to see video, or hear audio. If people aren't using headsets, then the audio from their speaker loops and causes feedback. Its always been painful for everyone. But everyone else seems to love it, so what am I doing wrong? (Running in gcp, fwiw)

porjo 7y ago
I just did a quick test using latest Jitsi meet running in Chrome and it does remember my external webcam settings (saved to browser localStorage). Looping audio is something that happens on alternative platforms too, so I'm not sure that's a fair criticism of Jitsi.

293984j29384 7y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how complicated it is to add authentication to Jitsi meet. I ended up following a guide I found on their website it wasn't trivial.

sbassi 7y ago
can you please tell me with guide you used? I need to implement Google authentication for a domain that is using Gsuite. Will appreciate any help.
- loyukfai 7y ago
  Ditto.
  - 293984j29384 7y ago
    https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain
    - loyukfai 7y ago
      Thanks!
- 293984j29384 7y ago
  I followed the guide below but I'm not sure if that'll be helpful for you. https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain

orthecreedence 7y ago

When I first saw Jitsi a few days ago, I thought "there's an open-source, p2p, e2e encrypted video chat already? Why did Riot build their own?" The next day I figured out that Riot's in-app video chat IS Jitsi. The world made sense again.

spoid 7y ago

I was under the impression that conference calls were not actually e2e encrypted: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet#security https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet#security https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409 Has this changed? In the end you could at least self-host though

BrowserMeeting 7y ago
Curious, also. I was under the impression that they were not encrypted with group calls

sbassi 7y ago

I would appreciate any help on how to implement authentication with an external service like a custom domain under Google (Gsuite).

MR4D 7y ago

Why can’t I use this on an iPhone? Would be perfect if I didn’t have to download the app.

loyukfai 7y ago

Wish the next update can improve further the blur background function, right now it consumes quite a lot CPU cycles, and is not supported on the mobile apps. Even better, to support virtual background: https://community.jitsi.org/t/virtual-backgrounds-using-green-screen/31173 https://community.jitsi.org/t/virtual-backgrounds-using-gree... Cheers.

pojntfx 7y ago

The best thing about Jitsi IMHO is that it scales so well. After having problems with Nextcloud Talk, I just wrote a chat bot that returns Jitsi links (see my GitHub if you’re interested) et voilà 100+ people in one conference!

barbs 7y ago
Wow. I keep reading that it doesn't scale to those numbers well but it sounds like you have a different experience? Do you enforce participants to use Chromium-based browsers?

BrowserMeeting 7y ago

Impressive to see they are still adding features after all these years. I hope it gets more adoption and gets easier to run a self-hosted version