6 ms·

I've tried Google Meet, Jitsi, and some other things, but Zoom is the only service that my 6+ year old laptop can handle for more than 5 min without nosediving

I've tried Google Meet, Jitsi, and some other things, but Zoom is the only service that my 6+ year old laptop can handle for more than 5 min without nosediving into 100% CPU usage and freezing up. Does anyone have other suggestions? Either for other services or for troubleshooting Jitsi?

11235813213455 6y ago
agreed that google meet is a CPU killer
gnud 6y ago
You could give Whereby [1] a try. I really liked it when it was named "appear.in" (that's now a completely different company), and used it for a bit, until my work switched to Teams. Whereby is, as far as I can tell, completely owned by a Norwegian registered company. 1: https://whereby.com https://whereby.com
- tlear 6y ago
  I really liked it, then they broke it on Safari. I still use it on Firefox, but it is annoying to switch just for using it
  - odinho 6y ago
    We have used a lot of time making it work on Safari. And we continue to use quite substantial resources on it. Their webrtc implementation is quite new, and not as stable as Chrome and Firefox. And with new code comes new bugs. There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have a workaround for the first, and will be doing a fix for the second once we're reasonably sure it won't regress other browsers. Is it any of those issues you talk about? Or is it something else? (I'm not personally familiar with the Safari issues, btw, since I'm a Linux user, but I keep an eye on Firefox and Chromium-based browsers)
    - tlear 6y ago
      Safari does not crash, but audio is not working. I will play with it today and send bug report. Might help you guys out, I really like it otherwise
    - azinman2 6y ago
      If you have a good repro please send to https://bugreport.apple.com https://bugreport.apple.com or contact Apple Developer Support.
- odinho 6y ago
  A Whereby-developer here. It's awesome you recommend us. <3 But we'll also kill your CPU ^_^ You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution. I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument for our product. Video can be quite heavy.
  - odinho 6y ago
    Actually, if you are using 4+ rooms, we will in many cases be better than some other webrtc services because we for these bigger rooms use a server in the middle to distribute all the streams. That will result in lower resource use. You only encode and send once, and it is distributed by the server. But if other webrtc kills CPU on 4 or less, we probably won't be much better. This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webrtc-insertable-streams/ https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
  - unicornporn 6y ago
    Nice! Fellow Scandinavian here. Just some feedback. I think the free tier was a little unclear. > Free > Personal use > 1 user > 1 meeting room I have trouble reading this. It's as if I coule only create one room for myself without having anybody to chat with.
    - odinho 6y ago
      Hehe, I see. Yeah copy and marketing is hard. I think we should try to re-do that one. It's hard to get right for all cases. A p2p room can have 4 total people in it. So say you plus 3 concurrent guests, none of those guests need any account or "user". Indeed even you don't have to log in after you've created the room if you leave it unlocked. :)
  - 6y ago
- xyproto 6y ago
  The name was probably too similar to another Norwegian company that is also named Appear.
solinent 6y ago
With Jitsi the main thing is the browser, you should try different versions of Firefox & Chrome.
spsrich2 6y ago
I've been using Whereby.com. It's clean, simple and 'just works'. No permissions popups or anything like that.
belval 6y ago
It's not free but I've had a lot of success with Amazon Chime which handles calls very well and support people "calling-in". Full disclosure: I am doing an internship at Amazon, but my experience predates me working there.
- rubyfan 6y ago
  Chime doesn’t work on a lot of corporate networks
  - belval 6y ago
    TIL thanks
- 40four 6y ago
  Due to the god awful state of Microsoft Teams conferencing, we recently started trying Chime at my new job. There are still some hiccups, but I can vouch that the quality of both audio and video is very good on Chime. We have also used GoToMeeting with a good amount of success. Anything but Teams, haha.
drdeadringer 6y ago
My laptop is at least that old and Jitsi is fine for me. Linux Mint OS, Firefox browser, both up to date.
- mushufasa 6y ago
  are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version (which seems to be distinct and not cross-compatible)? Are there settings you adjusted? Are you just doing one-on-one meetings (that works fine for me too) or group calls of 3+ (which is what I need to do everyday where it immediately becomes unusable)? I'm also using a linux distro based off ubuntu/debian.
  - drdeadringer 6y ago
    > are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version I am using Jitsi in//on the browser [for me, Firefox]. I don't know if I have a preference as I have only "just started using" the past few months via being given a link I click on whilst I am on my laptop... so unfortunately I cannot speak about Jitsi via Desktop Version at this time. > Are there settings you adjusted? Besides simple sound volume off of my OS//headphones, I use whatever the default settings are. > 1-1 meetings or 3+ group calls? Group calls, each time would be roughly 5-12 people. For other info just for giggles: The laptop I do this on is connected wirelessly to my home wireless network, about 6 feet away from my wireless router; my wireless router may have multiple people using it at a given time since I share. I'm in US-California-Silicon_Valley on Comcast.
    - feanaro 6y ago
      Jitsi Meet had some troubles in Firefox due to some WebRTC implementation differences. It is being worked on and the situation has improved, but I'm not sure whether all outstanding issues have been resolved. You could try Chromium and see if it gets any better.
easytiger 6y ago
There is a bug in meet where it suddenly decides to burn CPU like crazy. Can work fine for hours then fail
tppiotrowski 6y ago
Are you trying to do one-on-one of many-to-many calls? If you're doing just one-on-one there is very basic webrtc in web browser service[1]. I've also made my own for quickly connecting with people online[2], not sure if it's your use case though... [1] https://peercalls.com/ https://peercalls.com/ [2] https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/moonlite https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/moonlite
- mushufasa 6y ago
  It's for group calls. Jitsi worked fine one-on-one but as soon as a third person joined it became unusable.
  - freeopinion 6y ago
    Are any of the participants using Firefox? There's a known problem with Firefox's WebRTC and Jitsi wherein even a single Firefox participant can create performance issues for everyone.
    - mushufasa 6y ago
      I was using firefox. That's probably it. Does only Chrome work? Seems to defeat the point of FOSS...
      - ernesth 6y ago
        It is due to a bug in firefox (some kind of feature in webrtc not being enabled in Firefox). It however works in FOSS browsers such as chromium. It may be resolved now: the bugzilla entry mentions a patch: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823
andoma 6y ago
https://goteam.video/ https://goteam.video/ (Disclaimer/Plug: I work for the company that built this). It's WebRTC based but should work fine in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and latest Edge (ie the Chrome variant). We've just added optional end-to-end encryption for multiparty sessions based on the recent "Insertable Streams" feature available in Chrome M83+.
rewgs 6y ago
Has everyone forgotten about Skype? My D&D group switched from Zoom to Skype and the performance/quality is noticeably better. There's 5 of us and it's great. Free, no time limits, etc.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  My group (6 of us) did the oposite. We used to use Skype till we had continual problems of people getting infinite "loading" screens, we switched to Zoom the last 3 or 4 games because of it. I have to say the video quality is much better and the DM being able to screen share while we can still see each other is great. Also the "Brady Bunch" view is great, being able to see everyone at once is awesome. I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product.
  - tkgally 6y ago
    > I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product. That's my position, too. I teach at a large public university in Japan, where the school year begins in April. At the beginning of March, we were expecting to start classes in person as normal a month later. By around March 20, we had decided to teach most of our classes online; a week later, "most" had become "all." Teachers and students had little to no prior experience with online education, and their level of general digital literacy varied widely. From the plethora of tools available, we had to choose software that everyone could use and that would be reliable and scalable. Despite concerns about security issues, Zoom was chosen as our videoconferencing platform. That seems to have turned out to be a good choice, as it is stable, can handle large groups, and offers features (breakout rooms, video and audio recording, attendance reports, etc.) that are useful for university classes. That fact that it hasn't (yet) been blocked in China was also a factor in choosing it, as we have students stuck overseas who need to take part in classes. Anecdotal reports from colleagues who teach at other universities in Japan suggest that the non-Zoom platforms have not performed as well. Now that teachers and students are used to online classes, I hope we can also try other tools in the future. But considering how well Zoom performed during our hectic ramp-up to online teaching, I give it my grudging support for the time being.
kyuudou 6y ago
HighFive seems to be popular where I'm at. I like, it works. I have a couple of minor UI complaints but overall it's fine. I haven't seen it in use with large (say, >20 people) meetings, though.
thePunisher 6y ago
My laptop is almost 10 years old an works fine with Jitsi and Linux Mint on Firefox.
driverdan 6y ago
My 8 year old Macbook Pro works fine for all video conference services. It uses a lot of CPU and the fans go crazy but it works.

11235813213455 6y ago

agreed that google meet is a CPU killer

gnud 6y ago

You could give Whereby [1] a try. I really liked it when it was named "appear.in" (that's now a completely different company), and used it for a bit, until my work switched to Teams. Whereby is, as far as I can tell, completely owned by a Norwegian registered company. 1: https://whereby.com https://whereby.com

tlear 6y ago
I really liked it, then they broke it on Safari. I still use it on Firefox, but it is annoying to switch just for using it
- odinho 6y ago
  We have used a lot of time making it work on Safari. And we continue to use quite substantial resources on it. Their webrtc implementation is quite new, and not as stable as Chrome and Firefox. And with new code comes new bugs. There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have a workaround for the first, and will be doing a fix for the second once we're reasonably sure it won't regress other browsers. Is it any of those issues you talk about? Or is it something else? (I'm not personally familiar with the Safari issues, btw, since I'm a Linux user, but I keep an eye on Firefox and Chromium-based browsers)
  - tlear 6y ago
    Safari does not crash, but audio is not working. I will play with it today and send bug report. Might help you guys out, I really like it otherwise
  - azinman2 6y ago
    If you have a good repro please send to https://bugreport.apple.com https://bugreport.apple.com or contact Apple Developer Support.
odinho 6y ago
A Whereby-developer here. It's awesome you recommend us. <3 But we'll also kill your CPU ^_^ You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution. I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument for our product. Video can be quite heavy.
- odinho 6y ago
  Actually, if you are using 4+ rooms, we will in many cases be better than some other webrtc services because we for these bigger rooms use a server in the middle to distribute all the streams. That will result in lower resource use. You only encode and send once, and it is distributed by the server. But if other webrtc kills CPU on 4 or less, we probably won't be much better. This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webrtc-insertable-streams/ https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
- unicornporn 6y ago
  Nice! Fellow Scandinavian here. Just some feedback. I think the free tier was a little unclear. > Free > Personal use > 1 user > 1 meeting room I have trouble reading this. It's as if I coule only create one room for myself without having anybody to chat with.
  - odinho 6y ago
    Hehe, I see. Yeah copy and marketing is hard. I think we should try to re-do that one. It's hard to get right for all cases. A p2p room can have 4 total people in it. So say you plus 3 concurrent guests, none of those guests need any account or "user". Indeed even you don't have to log in after you've created the room if you leave it unlocked. :)
- 6y ago
xyproto 6y ago
The name was probably too similar to another Norwegian company that is also named Appear.

solinent 6y ago

With Jitsi the main thing is the browser, you should try different versions of Firefox & Chrome.

spsrich2 6y ago

I've been using Whereby.com. It's clean, simple and 'just works'. No permissions popups or anything like that.

belval 6y ago

It's not free but I've had a lot of success with Amazon Chime which handles calls very well and support people "calling-in". Full disclosure: I am doing an internship at Amazon, but my experience predates me working there.

rubyfan 6y ago
Chime doesn’t work on a lot of corporate networks
- belval 6y ago
  TIL thanks
40four 6y ago
Due to the god awful state of Microsoft Teams conferencing, we recently started trying Chime at my new job. There are still some hiccups, but I can vouch that the quality of both audio and video is very good on Chime. We have also used GoToMeeting with a good amount of success. Anything but Teams, haha.

drdeadringer 6y ago

My laptop is at least that old and Jitsi is fine for me. Linux Mint OS, Firefox browser, both up to date.

mushufasa 6y ago
are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version (which seems to be distinct and not cross-compatible)? Are there settings you adjusted? Are you just doing one-on-one meetings (that works fine for me too) or group calls of 3+ (which is what I need to do everyday where it immediately becomes unusable)? I'm also using a linux distro based off ubuntu/debian.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  > are you using it on the browser, or are you using the jitsi desktop version I am using Jitsi in//on the browser [for me, Firefox]. I don't know if I have a preference as I have only "just started using" the past few months via being given a link I click on whilst I am on my laptop... so unfortunately I cannot speak about Jitsi via Desktop Version at this time. > Are there settings you adjusted? Besides simple sound volume off of my OS//headphones, I use whatever the default settings are. > 1-1 meetings or 3+ group calls? Group calls, each time would be roughly 5-12 people. For other info just for giggles: The laptop I do this on is connected wirelessly to my home wireless network, about 6 feet away from my wireless router; my wireless router may have multiple people using it at a given time since I share. I'm in US-California-Silicon_Valley on Comcast.
  - feanaro 6y ago
    Jitsi Meet had some troubles in Firefox due to some WebRTC implementation differences. It is being worked on and the situation has improved, but I'm not sure whether all outstanding issues have been resolved. You could try Chromium and see if it gets any better.

easytiger 6y ago

There is a bug in meet where it suddenly decides to burn CPU like crazy. Can work fine for hours then fail

tppiotrowski 6y ago

Are you trying to do one-on-one of many-to-many calls? If you're doing just one-on-one there is very basic webrtc in web browser service[1]. I've also made my own for quickly connecting with people online[2], not sure if it's your use case though... [1] https://peercalls.com/ https://peercalls.com/ [2] https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/moonlite https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/moonlite

mushufasa 6y ago
It's for group calls. Jitsi worked fine one-on-one but as soon as a third person joined it became unusable.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  Are any of the participants using Firefox? There's a known problem with Firefox's WebRTC and Jitsi wherein even a single Firefox participant can create performance issues for everyone.
  - mushufasa 6y ago
    I was using firefox. That's probably it. Does only Chrome work? Seems to defeat the point of FOSS...
    - ernesth 6y ago
      It is due to a bug in firefox (some kind of feature in webrtc not being enabled in Firefox). It however works in FOSS browsers such as chromium. It may be resolved now: the bugzilla entry mentions a patch: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823

andoma 6y ago

https://goteam.video/ https://goteam.video/ (Disclaimer/Plug: I work for the company that built this). It's WebRTC based but should work fine in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and latest Edge (ie the Chrome variant). We've just added optional end-to-end encryption for multiparty sessions based on the recent "Insertable Streams" feature available in Chrome M83+.

rewgs 6y ago

Has everyone forgotten about Skype? My D&D group switched from Zoom to Skype and the performance/quality is noticeably better. There's 5 of us and it's great. Free, no time limits, etc.

deadbunny 6y ago
My group (6 of us) did the oposite. We used to use Skype till we had continual problems of people getting infinite "loading" screens, we switched to Zoom the last 3 or 4 games because of it. I have to say the video quality is much better and the DM being able to screen share while we can still see each other is great. Also the "Brady Bunch" view is great, being able to see everyone at once is awesome. I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product.
- tkgally 6y ago
  > I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product. That's my position, too. I teach at a large public university in Japan, where the school year begins in April. At the beginning of March, we were expecting to start classes in person as normal a month later. By around March 20, we had decided to teach most of our classes online; a week later, "most" had become "all." Teachers and students had little to no prior experience with online education, and their level of general digital literacy varied widely. From the plethora of tools available, we had to choose software that everyone could use and that would be reliable and scalable. Despite concerns about security issues, Zoom was chosen as our videoconferencing platform. That seems to have turned out to be a good choice, as it is stable, can handle large groups, and offers features (breakout rooms, video and audio recording, attendance reports, etc.) that are useful for university classes. That fact that it hasn't (yet) been blocked in China was also a factor in choosing it, as we have students stuck overseas who need to take part in classes. Anecdotal reports from colleagues who teach at other universities in Japan suggest that the non-Zoom platforms have not performed as well. Now that teachers and students are used to online classes, I hope we can also try other tools in the future. But considering how well Zoom performed during our hectic ramp-up to online teaching, I give it my grudging support for the time being.

kyuudou 6y ago

HighFive seems to be popular where I'm at. I like, it works. I have a couple of minor UI complaints but overall it's fine. I haven't seen it in use with large (say, >20 people) meetings, though.

thePunisher 6y ago

My laptop is almost 10 years old an works fine with Jitsi and Linux Mint on Firefox.

driverdan 6y ago

My 8 year old Macbook Pro works fine for all video conference services. It uses a lot of CPU and the fans go crazy but it works.