6 ms·

I came directly to the comments to recommend Jitsi instead. Glad the author made the same early in the article.

amelius 3y ago
With the maturing of WebRTC and related technologies, shouldn't it be dead simple by now to create an online video conferencing application that runs completely in the browser?
- jlokier 3y ago
  With more than two participants, real-time peer to peer video needs a lot more bandwidth on your local internet connection, compared with a hub. That's because you need to send your AV stream to all the other participants in separate streams, instead of one stream to the hub. Same for what you receive, as the hub sends you a composite of the current speaker and thumbnail videos of everyone else. Most people don't have a network at home that can handle, say, sending 50 copies of your AV stream when you're speaking to 50 other participants. With that many, even audio-only is a challenge. There are some clever p2p relay mechanisms you could use in theory to bring the bandwidth down to not grow as much with number of participants (but still a constant factor more than the hub method), but they would add significant latency. For example your AV is sent to one peer, they send it to the next peer, and so on in a chain or tree. This works well for non-real-time AV like p2p distribution of movies, but not real-time meetings. If multicast IP worked over the internet at large that would help but it doesn't work. Even if it did it wouldn't be enough for the full-vs-thumbnails continuous renegotiation needed to keep download bandwidth steady, nor could it do per-user quality-vs-rate adaptation.
_joel 3y ago
Good luck to all those that have been trying to convince people to get off Zoom at $WORK (it's not that simple...). This should add some fuel to the fire.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AbraKdabra 3y ago
  We use it at work (20k plus employees) since before the pandemic and it has been awesome.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lars_francke 3y ago
    From the context I'm not entirely sure what "it"is. Zoom? Jitsi? Something else...
    - _joel 3y ago
      From the article, getting off Zoom due to dodgy T&C changes, to something like Jitsi.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
Has anyone tried Jitsi versus BigBlueButton?
- Corsome 3y ago
  I'm using both and they are very similar. The free jitsi service shouldn't be really used in a comparison as self hosted works miles better (at least in my experience).
littlestymaar 3y ago
Are there commercial offering for Jitsi around? (that is, not self-hosted)
- jamesponddotco 3y ago
  You can use the hosted version[1] or get a commercial offering from 8x8[2]. [1] https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ [2] https://jaas.8x8.vc/ https://jaas.8x8.vc/
  - jayknight 3y ago
    I'm surprised 8x8 is still around. I had a cheap home voip phone line from them in the mid 2000s.
- jarito 3y ago
  Yes. https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/ https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/
- davidpaulyoung 3y ago
  https://federated.computer...includes https://federated.computer...includes Jitsi and Matrix...per domain...
nolok 3y ago
Does Jitsi (or other) have all the group working features ? Separate a group into many smaller group still under the same call, split and join them at leisure, share screen back and forth, ... ?
lucideer 3y ago
Jitsi's free SaaS is a great resource to have available but it's not really viable for many many (most?) use-cases. Apart from general stability issues (which is in fairness are always improving) the biggest blocker is the "Video turned off to save bandwidth" message that you will inevitably receive on any call with more than 2 members. This doesn't seem in my experience to just be something that occurs occasionally due to load - it's very consistent. Nor is there any option to override it (e.g. a call with 5 participants where 4 have turned off video will still experience this on the 5th participant - video can't be re-enabled once you see this). If this were a limitation of a free plan, with a paid option offering higher bandwidth, that would be cool, but the only paid options they offer are app integrations starting at $100/mo for 300 users.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > the biggest blocker is the "Video turned off to save bandwidth" message that you will inevitably receive on any call with more than 2 members. It's not inevitable. I use Jitsi every week for a 3+ hour meeting and I haven't seen that error in more than a year. I don't remember if I ever tracked down what was causing it, but it may have been high latency or low bandwidth on my end (which I resolved about a year ago).
  - DANmode 3y ago
    I resolved it by asking my partner to use something for the meeting other than Firefox. Worked.
- tornato7 3y ago
  Yes, you can change the maxFullResolutionParticipants setting in config.js to fix this.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Will you walk my mom through that?
    - 3y ago

With the maturing of WebRTC and related technologies, shouldn't it be dead simple by now to create an online video conferencing application that runs completely in the browser?

jlokier 3y ago
With more than two participants, real-time peer to peer video needs a lot more bandwidth on your local internet connection, compared with a hub. That's because you need to send your AV stream to all the other participants in separate streams, instead of one stream to the hub. Same for what you receive, as the hub sends you a composite of the current speaker and thumbnail videos of everyone else. Most people don't have a network at home that can handle, say, sending 50 copies of your AV stream when you're speaking to 50 other participants. With that many, even audio-only is a challenge. There are some clever p2p relay mechanisms you could use in theory to bring the bandwidth down to not grow as much with number of participants (but still a constant factor more than the hub method), but they would add significant latency. For example your AV is sent to one peer, they send it to the next peer, and so on in a chain or tree. This works well for non-real-time AV like p2p distribution of movies, but not real-time meetings. If multicast IP worked over the internet at large that would help but it doesn't work. Even if it did it wouldn't be enough for the full-vs-thumbnails continuous renegotiation needed to keep download bandwidth steady, nor could it do per-user quality-vs-rate adaptation.

_joel 3y ago

Good luck to all those that have been trying to convince people to get off Zoom at $WORK (it's not that simple...). This should add some fuel to the fire.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AbraKdabra 3y ago
We use it at work (20k plus employees) since before the pandemic and it has been awesome.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lars_francke 3y ago
  From the context I'm not entirely sure what "it"is. Zoom? Jitsi? Something else...
  - _joel 3y ago
    From the article, getting off Zoom due to dodgy T&C changes, to something like Jitsi.

gjsman-1000 3y ago

Has anyone tried Jitsi versus BigBlueButton?

Corsome 3y ago
I'm using both and they are very similar. The free jitsi service shouldn't be really used in a comparison as self hosted works miles better (at least in my experience).

littlestymaar 3y ago

Are there commercial offering for Jitsi around? (that is, not self-hosted)

jamesponddotco 3y ago
You can use the hosted version[1] or get a commercial offering from 8x8[2]. [1] https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ [2] https://jaas.8x8.vc/ https://jaas.8x8.vc/
- jayknight 3y ago
  I'm surprised 8x8 is still around. I had a cheap home voip phone line from them in the mid 2000s.
jarito 3y ago
Yes. https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/ https://jaas.8x8.vc/#/
davidpaulyoung 3y ago
https://federated.computer...includes https://federated.computer...includes Jitsi and Matrix...per domain...

nolok 3y ago

Does Jitsi (or other) have all the group working features ? Separate a group into many smaller group still under the same call, split and join them at leisure, share screen back and forth, ... ?

lucideer 3y ago

Jitsi's free SaaS is a great resource to have available but it's not really viable for many many (most?) use-cases. Apart from general stability issues (which is in fairness are always improving) the biggest blocker is the "Video turned off to save bandwidth" message that you will inevitably receive on any call with more than 2 members. This doesn't seem in my experience to just be something that occurs occasionally due to load - it's very consistent. Nor is there any option to override it (e.g. a call with 5 participants where 4 have turned off video will still experience this on the 5th participant - video can't be re-enabled once you see this). If this were a limitation of a free plan, with a paid option offering higher bandwidth, that would be cool, but the only paid options they offer are app integrations starting at $100/mo for 300 users.

brightlancer 3y ago
> the biggest blocker is the "Video turned off to save bandwidth" message that you will inevitably receive on any call with more than 2 members. It's not inevitable. I use Jitsi every week for a 3+ hour meeting and I haven't seen that error in more than a year. I don't remember if I ever tracked down what was causing it, but it may have been high latency or low bandwidth on my end (which I resolved about a year ago).
- DANmode 3y ago
  I resolved it by asking my partner to use something for the meeting other than Firefox. Worked.
tornato7 3y ago
Yes, you can change the maxFullResolutionParticipants setting in config.js to fix this.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Will you walk my mom through that?
  - 3y ago