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JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you
- fiatjaf 6y agoI tried to run a Jitsi server. It's a madness full of Docker impossible things to run and a very long and confusing configuration file. I wonder why can't these things be provided as binaries with a simple set of settings. Now they offer Jitsi as a service for free up to 25 users? That's great though. It should cover 99% of normal people use cases, so no one will use meet.jit.si anymore.
- buovjaga 6y agoOver at The Document Foundation, we use a Salt setup with no Docker: https://git.libreoffice.org/infra/salt/+/refs/heads/master/jitsi/ https://git.libreoffice.org/infra/salt/+/refs/heads/master/j...
- saghul 6y ago> I tried to run a Jitsi server. It's a madness full of Docker impossible things to run and a very long and confusing configuration file. Sorry to hear that. Any chance you can provide some more details on what you tried and didn't work? I'd like to improve on this. > I wonder why can't these things be provided as binaries with a simple set of settings. That's kind of what they already are, but at certain degree of complexity it unfortunately leaks back to the user.
- fiatjaf 6y agoNo, sorry, I don't remember anymore. But it was just a hobby server for a group of friends to use and we've given up since. I just remember being forced to install docker and edit a docker-compose.yml, and then configs would show up in other parts of the system that were not the directory I was in. Then finally I got the server and people could join but they couldn't see the others. Anyway, I probably didn't invest the right amount of time and focus to get it working.
- theandrewbailey 6y agoI set up a Jitsi instance last year, and it didn't involve Docker at all. Getting the ports set up was the biggest issue. I used this guide: https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-guide-quickstart https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...
- nikisweeting 6y agoI don't know about others but I much prefer running a docker container than a random binary.
- svarlamov 6y agoCongrats this seems like a very needed product! We tried Jitsi for our web app (1), but ultimately settled on Daily.co for it's pricing and easy developer experience. How does JaaS stability compare to Jitsi? Any one here chose Jitsi over Daily? 1. https://codingrooms.com/ https://codingrooms.com/
- riedel 6y agoThis is great since selfhosted jitsi somehow developed into an IT support nightmare for us. Would be awesome to hear how they are doing the scaling. Our IT only offers jitsi only for max 10 ppl in a room which keeps us from using it at least in 50% of the cases. Also some users are reporting problems, so it would really be great to see a supported desktop app for all relevant platforms for those that struggle to get the browser setup right. Also native performance background effects has become something that at least could support bits of privacy in this crazy home office world ( it is not always e2ee that makes the difference).
- saghul 6y ago> Would be awesome to hear how they are doing the scaling. Shameless plug: https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/jitsi_scaling/ https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/jitsi_scaling/ > so it would really be great to see a supported desktop app for all relevant platforms We have an Electron based app: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron > Also native performance background effects This is in the works, we have to be able to share some news soon!
- anticensor 6y agoBigBlueButton is more suitable for larger conferences.
- svarlamov 6y agoOddly enough, we also used BigBlueButton for a while and really loved the additional features like the whiteboard but also had to drop it because we were doing more support for BBB than our core product...
- pojntfx 6y agoAwesome! Chose Jitsi a while back for my old high school's COVID chat system and it's been working flawlessly.
- saghul 6y agoGlad to hear this! <3
- kabes 6y agoIf I understand correctly this is for jitsi meet. Is a hosted version of the jitsi SFU standalone also planned?
- cudder 6y ago> Free for up to 25 monthly active users This is the only mention of pricing that I can find on your site unless I sign up. I wonder what the cost is for >25 MAU.
- turbinerneiter 6y agohttps://imgur.com/a/uf1mTxy https://imgur.com/a/uf1mTxy 99$/month for 300 MAU
- arcturus17 6y agoVideo is crazy expensive. I know the underlying infra is complex, but these costs mean you would need a lot of capital and a very aggressive monetization strategy from the get-go to even get started, no?
- turbinerneiter 6y agoIn my mind I'm comparing this to Teams/Slack/Zoom and so on - in that context it is cheap, no? Not sure if this is the right context tough.
- arcturus17 6y agoNo, you're right. I was thinking in terms of B2C economics... $99 for 300 MAU would be crazy for a consumer startup product. $99 for 300 internal business users is completely different.
- argument_clinic 6y agoBTW, having to sign up just to see the price is a big no-no for me and I'd probably not sign up just to see it.
- robertkrahn01 6y agoCoScreen, an app sharing and pair programming tool [1] runs on Jitsi / JaaS. I work on that project. We're really happy with the service since a reliable and fast global infrastructure is key for what we offer. [1] https://www.coscreen.co https://www.coscreen.co
- mstade 6y agoHi! This looks great. I'm assuming it being free is temporary, do you have any information on future pricing?
- robertkrahn01 6y agoThank you! We've not yet made a final decision about pricing yet, the first priority is to make it as reliable as we can and support multiple OS. However, there will very likely be some kind of free tier, similar to Slack and Zoom.
- emmanueloga_ 6y agoThis looks really polished (...at least judging by the great marketing video...) will have to try it!. May I ask how long have you guys been working on this? Just curious :-)
- robertkrahn01 6y agoThanks :) The idea has been around for a number of years but only beginning of last year (pre covid) we made the leap and started working full time on the project.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoIs it only available for MacOS? When I go to the download page, it only shows me download for MacOS.
- robertkrahn01 6y agoYeah, we're are currently working on Windows, it's almost ready. Expect a first beta in a few weeks.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoI host the Asia-Pacific weekly meetup for BeWelcome every Thursday night, starting in about an hour (23:00 NZDT, 18:00 UTC+8) https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers BeWelcome is like CouchSurfing, but free and open-source. The leaders therefore chose to support other OSS where possible, including Jitsi. Less than 25 people attend regularly, but hopefully it can grow (not many people travelling these days, it's nice to hear first-hand about life in Singapore, China, Korea, Germany, Italy). If we have Jitsi-related issues, I'll try to let you know! And you're all welcome to drop in and find out more :)
- zelphirkalt 6y agoIt is probably offtopic here and therefore you are downvoted by other people, but personally I thank you for getting the word out there. Hope to join a meeting soon!
- mike_d 6y agoNow that they have commercialized the project, I suspect a rebranding away from "Meet" is probably coming next. It is obviously confusingly similar to Google Meet.
- amenod 6y agoWell, they can also just wait for Google to either rename or kill off their product. /s On a more serious note, it was never confusing to me - I didn't even notice they share the same word until now tbh. And quick search for "meet videoconferencing" shows quite a few of the products named similarly. To me it is almost as generic as "chat".
- lozf 6y agoJitsi were using "meet" years before google, way back when Hangouts was still newish and quite good.
- johnxie 6y agoTaskade's video chat runs on Jitsi, on the same page with our collaborative task list. We're happy with the performance and integration so far. You can test out our implementation no signup needed: https://www.taskade.com/new https://www.taskade.com/new
- cloogshicer 6y agoDoes anybody know a video conferencing tool with low CPU usage while screen sharing? All the tools I've tried, including Jitsi, slow down my computer to a crawl.
- mguerville 6y agoI’ve had similar issues and have not found a tool that cooperated better. Here are a few things that helped though: - App police (mac app) to reduce cpu allocation for any given app - unplug external display monitor during video calls - turn off any video enhancing settings in app (mirror video, enhanced light, etc) as well as virtual background or background blur It’s crazy that I’m 2021 we don’t have video calling that isn’t a ginormous performance hog
- cloogshicer 6y agoThanks for your response! Unfortunately I'm already doing all those things. Agreed, I think it's insane. How come there isn't a single App out there that works well for such a key technology? I guess it's a really hard problem to solve.
- kwindla 6y ago> It’s crazy that I’m 2021 we don’t have video calling that isn’t a ginormous performance hog It sure is. On the other hand, the big tech companies did not view video calls as a critical use case until ~9 months ago. You can see this in how much Chrome has improved in its last 3 releases. A year ago, you could play ~15 videos simultaneously in a page on Chrome before <stalling, chaos, and crashing>. Now, on the same machine, you can play >50. This matters for video calls because the standard stream topology these days for multi-party calls is 1 up, N down, where N is the number of participants in the call. Hardware and OS support is critical, too, so this is an ecosystem challenge. - encoder pipelines don't do low-resolution streams very well, which matters for large video calls - encoder pipelines don't do variable framerate, variable resolution, large resolution/low-framerate, and "non-standard" resolutions as well as they could - hardware support for newer codecs (vp9, h265, av1) would help - decoder pipelines aren't great at decoding lots of small videos in parallel Everyone focused on single-stream video playback for the last few years, which led to really amazing improvements watching video. Nobody complains anymore about their fan spinning up every time they watch Netflix. Now we have to put the same effort into the building blocks needed for video calls.
- saghul 6y agoHey all, saghul from team Jitsi here. Didn't expect this to spread so fast, thanks everyone! Happy to answer any questions you may have!
- trestenhortz 6y agoAre you concerned amazon will take your business?
- saghul 6y agoNo. They have a similar offering of their own. We also run our infra on AWS so they are getting business from us already.
- darkteflon 6y agoHi saghul, thanks for dropping by. We’re currently running self-hosted Jitsi Meet in production and have been very happy with performance - particularly stability. We would however be interested in switching to JaaS as we’d like to get away from managing our own infra and just host a landing page through, e.g., NextJS on Vercel, with a JaaS iFrame. The landing page mentions deep customisation but when clicking through to the documentation I see only custom branding, etc., through the developer web console. We have some customisations on the front-end (custom kick messages, auto-enabling lobbies, etc). Is it possible to make these sorts of customisations to JaaS? It seems like an iFrame is the recommended integration so would be great to get a sense if any of these things are possible. Could you speak generally to the degree of customisation possible outside of the developer web console? Thanks in advance.
- saghul 6y ago> We would however be interested in switching to JaaS as we’d like to get away from managing our own infra and just host a landing page through, e.g., NextJS on Vercel, with a JaaS iFrame. This is indeed what we had in mind when building JaaS. > We have some customisations on the front-end (custom kick messages, auto-enabling lobbies, etc). Is it possible to make these sorts of customisations to JaaS? Depends on exactly what. As we just launched we are learning what our customers want and adding new APIs and more customization options pretty rapidly. Please get in touch and let's discuss what APIs / customizations you'd need. > Could you speak generally to the degree of customisation possible outside of the developer web console? As you mentioned before, the iframe API is indeed the recommended way for integrating.
- telesilla 6y agoOne of the great things about Jitsi are the config options: https://meet.jit.si/JitsiMeetAPIExampletest#config.p2p.enabled=false&config.disableAP=true&config.disableAEC=true&config.disableNS=true&config.disableAGC=true&config.disableHPF=true&config.enableP2P=false&config.stereo=true https://meet.jit.si/JitsiMeetAPIExampletest#config.p2p.enabl... Should give you stereo, high-quality audio suitable for music, with echo cancellation disabled. One of the things that makes Jitsi not perfect however is that I understand that Jitsi Videobridge is an SFU, thus not appropriate for a large conference. Perhaps now they have a way to monetise, they can add this and charge for bandwidth/CPU usage.
- saghul 6y ago> One of the things that makes Jitsi not perfect however is that I understand that Jitsi Videobridge is an SFU, thus not appropriate for a large conference. On the contrary, this is how you can scale up to large conferences. We do bridge cascading, you can read more about it here: https://jitsi.org/blog/jitsi-meet-now-with-geographical-bridge-cascading/ https://jitsi.org/blog/jitsi-meet-now-with-geographical-brid... We are now working on very large conferences, expect some news soon :-)
- worble 6y agoLooking for pricing, I get to this page: https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video >We're charging on a Monthly Active User (MAU) >Pricing starts at $0.35/MAU and decreases based on volume. >An MAU is defined as a unique user who attended at least one meeting, with at least one other user, in the same month. To determine a unique user, we store an identifier on the device's local storage, and that will remain the same as long as the user uses the same browser and same device and doesn't clear their local cache data. Mobile is similar. An identifier remains across updates and gets removed if you delete the app. So does that mean that if they are running Cookie AutoDelete or Temporary Containers addons, or simply clear all their browser data after exiting, any single user could easily eat all your user limit if they just repeatedly connected to the service? Or, even just having a single person connect on their desktop, laptop and phone once would eat 3 of your licenses?
- owens99 6y agoThat’s way too expensive. My $80/month server bill can support millions of users per month but would only get me <300 MAUs on this service? Edit: my guess is I misunderstood who they are targeting with this. Thought they were targeting developers who want to integrate Jitsi with an existing product.
- petters 6y agoSeems much more expensive than e.g. OpenTok. Aren't they similar?
- saghul 6y agoThe pricing models are vastly different AFAIK. How are you comparing them?
- acatsdream 6y agoWill there be a flutter sdk?
- saghul 6y agoWe have no plans for it at this point. We provide native SDKs for Android and iOS and IIRC there is already a 3rd party Flutter module which exposes our native SDKs to Flutter.
- gardnr 6y agoIs it still owned by atlassian?
- d0100 6y agoJitsi is great and we've been using it for some time. We switched from a custom WebRTC because error handling becomes too complex with browser permissions and connection. It does work much better, however there are still a few times that video just doesn't work, with no way to debug why
- TYPE_FASTER 6y agoI really like Jitsi. I've been running it on a Digital Ocean droplet for my own use. The one feature I've been missing is remote control during a screen sharing session. I understand it was removed for security reasons (https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/issues/431 https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/issues/431). Are there any plans to implement the feature again in the future? Thanks!
- saghul 6y agoYes, it will come back. We have so many things in our plate that not everything can be acted upon in a timely manner. Don't despair :-)
- TYPE_FASTER 6y agoAwesome, thanks for the reply.
- pqdbr 6y agoGreat news!
- css 6y agoWhat is the screen sharing performance of this like? When I tried to set up the Jitsi integration for Mattermost earlier this week, even with only 3 people in a call, we could not get the stream over 1-2 fps. Discord handles native-res 60fps streaming.
- saghul 6y agoWhen running from a browser, Chrome specially lowers the framerate and prefers higher resolution. Not sure we can tune it for high fps.
- gregoriol 6y agoWould it work with lib-jitsi-meet? In other words, would you jitsi be able to take care of the hosting while we develop a custom interface with the lib?
- saghul 6y agoYes! You are welcome to build your own UI with lib-jitsi-meet.
- kitkat_new 6y agowhen will E2EE get out of Beta?
- saghul 6y agoHard to tell. We're calling it beta because we may change how the feature works, not because it doesn't work properly yet.