The reason is that the Jitsi Meet conferencing UI exists only as a webapp. In other words, you have to render the "private conference" somehow - which means co

The reason is that the Jitsi Meet conferencing UI exists only as a webapp. In other words, you have to render the "private conference" somehow - which means compositing together the various WebRTC streams, switching to the active talker, highlighting them, showing their names etc, rendering screenshares etc. Jitsi is an SFU (Stream Forwarding Unit), which means that the compositing is done clientside in the webapp with a bunch of HTML+JS+CSS and WebRTC video streams - so if you want to livestream a conference, you need to have a client somewhere to do that rendering. Which means needing headless chromium + ffmpeg to capture it. The alternative would be to use a system where the conference is rendered serverside in the first place - a so called MCU (Multipoint Conferencing Unit) like FreeSWITCH. But this has a different set of tradeoffs, and having integrated both with Matrix we currently default to Jitsi. Totally agreed that it feels unintuitive to spin up a farm of 50 headless chromiums in order to livestream a conference though!