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Does anyone have any suggestions on a platform to facilitate Tip #4: Idling in a Videoconference Room? Zoom is the obvious choice, but wonder if anyone has buil

Does anyone have any suggestions on a platform to facilitate Tip #4: Idling in a Videoconference Room? Zoom is the obvious choice, but wonder if anyone has built something better for this use case?

jamie_ca 6y ago
I haven't used it personally, but https://sneek.io/ https://sneek.io/ will do ad-hoc video chat. Those that aren't "live" on the call are still up on the wall of faces, with a screen capture from their webcam every few minutes. Avoids the waste of unused video over the network, but still gives a sense of your teammates being live people going about their day.
renewiltord 6y ago
I have friends who ran a startup full remote. They sat on Discord together all day. Video off most of the time.
- donclark 6y ago
  I think this will work - but only for people (groups) that can communicate GREAT.
- anon9001 6y ago
  I don't know that non-gamers would understand idling in a discord/mumble/ventrilo/teamspeak server, but it's for sure the next big trend in remote work. I've been hanging out this way with friends for a long time. I won't be surprised to see Discord pivot to b2b in a few years and completely destroy Slack.
  - killerdhmo 6y ago
    Kevin Kwok agrees: https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/ https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/
rickyc091 6y ago
I'm a big fan of https://pragli.com/ https://pragli.com/ for this. Been using this successfully with my team.
CarbyAu 6y ago
If you want to host your own, Jitsi Meet Server. It doesn't take much CPU or RAM. Bandwidth is king. Uses browser or ios/android apps for clients. I am light on with webtech and linux but I followed their "few commands and a shell script" install notes to get something working with LetsEncrypt https. If you host the video centre, and everything is https out from there, it should be somewhat secure. For business security you may want to go over it more carefully than my home bodgy job though.
- spurgu 6y ago
  This is cool, thanks for the tip! How is performance compared to meet.jit.si?
  - CarbyAu 6y ago
    I used meet.jit.si once but my own server mostly and I couldn't tell you the difference in user experience. Seemed exactly the same. Video: The default install sets up for 720p. It seems to start notably worse and then scale up to 720p within a minute, often much less. Some congestion control thing I expect. You can set 1080p or other (lower too) resolution limits if you like. I tried 1080p but at ~6-7Mbit per connection outgoing my home internet 18MBit upload got saturated pretty quick! The default 720p has worked ok for up to 6 people for a few hours at a time. 1 of the people was Europe-to-Australia and seemed like anyone else. No huge lag times but some lag as you'd expect from that distance. Audio: I note this separately as it seems to be handled separately by Jitsi. We've noticed it seems to tick along pretty well the same the whole time, whether the video is going up or down in resolution due to congestion or not. Audio quality seems fine. The mic makes more difference in quality than the audio codec. Apps: Have a requirement to go into setting and put the URL for your own server. Otherwise it defaults to the public one. Bit awkward. It seems to suck down a lot of battery but I haven't benchmarked it against anything else. Maybe this is normal for camera/compression/decompression/display/network all at the same time?! Other niceties: can share desktop/application, has a text chat side option too, has "hand up" indicator if someone wants to indicate they wish to speak - not that we've ever used it. All in all, it works well for home personal use with 6 people so far. Definitely handy to have and I intend to keep one running for the future. Being able to send a link to my friends and show them my desktop, or vice versa, is handy if nothing else. Edit - added App section
peterwwillis 6y ago
I can tell you it won't work with Zoom. For some reason it takes over all of your sound, so if I play quiet music I can't hear it. This would also be incredibly wasteful of bandwidth and CPU. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and if everyone in the Zoomy world kept a silent conference on in the background all day, the internet pipes [Zoom's especially] would be quite a bit more full, and my CPU would continue to churn unnecessarily. Then there's the etiquette. What if people just start water-cooler-chatting? Maybe at a low volume it's OK, but I could see people leaving just because of too much laughter [yes laughter is annoying and yes I am a horrible person].
- nefitty 6y ago
  One of the worst Zoom things is that it doesn’t allow you to control the volume of meetings...
shadykiller 6y ago
My wife's ex colleagues built this - https://www.remotion.com/ https://www.remotion.com/. It's more like always on room
k1t 6y ago
There was this Show HN for watercooler.work a few months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23434271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23434271
wcarss 6y ago
I'm working on a product to help with this exact type of use. I would love to find anyone interested in trying out a tool for this -- contact me at carss.w@gmail.com or drop a name/email into the form at https://heysync.chat https://heysync.chat if that's you! I will have a simple version ready to try within a few weeks. The idea is make asynchronous audio chat easy, in a context similar to slack. You can send audio easily in place of text and whoever you sent it to can listen to it live or later. Then they can get back to you the same way. Imagine a chat room with 5 people talking, where you can replay the whole thing and chime in later if you were busy. It's chat across time. Again, if you're interested, please reach out!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Does anyone have any suggestions on a platform to facilitate Tip #4: Idling in a Videoconference Room? Zoom is the obvious choice, but wonder if anyone has built something better for this use case?

jamie_ca 6y ago

I haven't used it personally, but https://sneek.io/ https://sneek.io/ will do ad-hoc video chat. Those that aren't "live" on the call are still up on the wall of faces, with a screen capture from their webcam every few minutes. Avoids the waste of unused video over the network, but still gives a sense of your teammates being live people going about their day.

renewiltord 6y ago

I have friends who ran a startup full remote. They sat on Discord together all day. Video off most of the time.

donclark 6y ago
I think this will work - but only for people (groups) that can communicate GREAT.
anon9001 6y ago
I don't know that non-gamers would understand idling in a discord/mumble/ventrilo/teamspeak server, but it's for sure the next big trend in remote work. I've been hanging out this way with friends for a long time. I won't be surprised to see Discord pivot to b2b in a few years and completely destroy Slack.
- killerdhmo 6y ago
  Kevin Kwok agrees: https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/ https://kwokchain.com/2019/08/16/the-arc-of-collaboration/

rickyc091 6y ago

I'm a big fan of https://pragli.com/ https://pragli.com/ for this. Been using this successfully with my team.

CarbyAu 6y ago

If you want to host your own, Jitsi Meet Server. It doesn't take much CPU or RAM. Bandwidth is king. Uses browser or ios/android apps for clients. I am light on with webtech and linux but I followed their "few commands and a shell script" install notes to get something working with LetsEncrypt https. If you host the video centre, and everything is https out from there, it should be somewhat secure. For business security you may want to go over it more carefully than my home bodgy job though.

spurgu 6y ago
This is cool, thanks for the tip! How is performance compared to meet.jit.si?
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  I used meet.jit.si once but my own server mostly and I couldn't tell you the difference in user experience. Seemed exactly the same. Video: The default install sets up for 720p. It seems to start notably worse and then scale up to 720p within a minute, often much less. Some congestion control thing I expect. You can set 1080p or other (lower too) resolution limits if you like. I tried 1080p but at ~6-7Mbit per connection outgoing my home internet 18MBit upload got saturated pretty quick! The default 720p has worked ok for up to 6 people for a few hours at a time. 1 of the people was Europe-to-Australia and seemed like anyone else. No huge lag times but some lag as you'd expect from that distance. Audio: I note this separately as it seems to be handled separately by Jitsi. We've noticed it seems to tick along pretty well the same the whole time, whether the video is going up or down in resolution due to congestion or not. Audio quality seems fine. The mic makes more difference in quality than the audio codec. Apps: Have a requirement to go into setting and put the URL for your own server. Otherwise it defaults to the public one. Bit awkward. It seems to suck down a lot of battery but I haven't benchmarked it against anything else. Maybe this is normal for camera/compression/decompression/display/network all at the same time?! Other niceties: can share desktop/application, has a text chat side option too, has "hand up" indicator if someone wants to indicate they wish to speak - not that we've ever used it. All in all, it works well for home personal use with 6 people so far. Definitely handy to have and I intend to keep one running for the future. Being able to send a link to my friends and show them my desktop, or vice versa, is handy if nothing else. Edit - added App section

peterwwillis 6y ago

I can tell you it won't work with Zoom. For some reason it takes over all of your sound, so if I play quiet music I can't hear it. This would also be incredibly wasteful of bandwidth and CPU. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and if everyone in the Zoomy world kept a silent conference on in the background all day, the internet pipes [Zoom's especially] would be quite a bit more full, and my CPU would continue to churn unnecessarily. Then there's the etiquette. What if people just start water-cooler-chatting? Maybe at a low volume it's OK, but I could see people leaving just because of too much laughter [yes laughter is annoying and yes I am a horrible person].

nefitty 6y ago
One of the worst Zoom things is that it doesn’t allow you to control the volume of meetings...

shadykiller 6y ago

My wife's ex colleagues built this - https://www.remotion.com/ https://www.remotion.com/. It's more like always on room

k1t 6y ago

There was this Show HN for watercooler.work a few months ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23434271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23434271

wcarss 6y ago

I'm working on a product to help with this exact type of use. I would love to find anyone interested in trying out a tool for this -- contact me at carss.w@gmail.com or drop a name/email into the form at https://heysync.chat https://heysync.chat if that's you! I will have a simple version ready to try within a few weeks. The idea is make asynchronous audio chat easy, in a context similar to slack. You can send audio easily in place of text and whoever you sent it to can listen to it live or later. Then they can get back to you the same way. Imagine a chat room with 5 people talking, where you can replay the whole thing and chime in later if you were busy. It's chat across time. Again, if you're interested, please reach out!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]