I normally complain about terrible open source branding but didn't have a negative reaction to this branding when I saw this post.
Goes to show how important it is to do user research on a broad swath of the population to make sure you have branding that isn't off-putting to a significant subset of people.
Definitely. There is also universal agreement in good branding vs bad branding. I’ve been browsing the top branding blog for over 12 years now: https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
It's a feeling, so not easily rationalizable... I wonder if it has anything to do with being "Gypped" (), but for me even outside of that connotation, the word evokes negative feeling.
() Interestingly, I too have for the first time looked up the etymology and feel uncomfortable; I think because I've only ever heard it before, and assumed it was spelled differently like "Jipped" or something
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/242429836...
SIP Communicator is renamed Jitsi (from the Bulgarian “жици”, or “wires”), since it now also supports audio and video over XMMP’s Jingle extensions and it would be silly to still call it SIP Communicator.
I've noticed that a lot of people have an aversion to software that doesn't have a name that's made from English word(s). This is possibly because the most common software out there has this property, and so people subconsciously associate it with quality (exceptions abound, of course, Samsung, Adobe, but I think that you need to reach a certain size to break free from the negative stigma in English-speaking countries).
Come to think of it, this may be why Linux is still seen as an outsider to non-technical people, as though it were less of a serious product than Windows (which has an English word as a name).
The name Linux is not the issue, the fact that it isn't a product might be.
Think of Windows or macOS, pick a version, you can picture what it looks like and what apps run on it. Linux isn't a specific product. You can't install Linux 10.15. You might install a specific kernel version, or a specific distro version, but Linux is more of an assemblage of packages rather than one cohesive end-product. And it's not as easy to picture Linux in your mind. One Linux user will use default Ubuntu installation, one Linux user will boot directly to terminal because window managers, and other Linux user will be using Android which is completely different case as well.
Back in undergrad (ca 2013) when I got super serious about privacy, I used the Jitsi client to videoconference with friends over my XMPP server [1]. It was pretty much the only open-source VoIP solution I could get working at the time. The experience was actually pretty smooth, with quality comparable to Skype and Hangouts at the time.
The main pain point was that I had to force everyone to download Jitsi and connect to my XMPP server...
Excited to see they're still doing cool stuff!
[1]Technically the XMPP server is just session management.
Do you mean for more than 3 - the call/video is routed through the server and would consume server bandwidth? If so how is jitsi paying for all this if it is free?
8x8 is a huge VoIP company. McDonald’s uses them, so when you call McDonald’s, you are calling an 8x8 number.
My firm used to use them. Their tech was rock solid but clunky for our stack so we switched to RingCentral. Quality isn’t as good, and I wonder often if we made a mistake.
I can hook your business and anyone remote up with free sip LCD screen desk phones, usually polycomm and unlimited long distance, SD-WAN managed data if needed business phone lines with app for all phones, desktop soft phone and video bridge from Gotomeeting for s fraction of what I was paying before. I just helped a 500 employees company get 500 new phones and cut their phone bill by over half. They were being charged $25 per line, $5 per phone lease and even being charged for ac power adapter... Made the switch and saving them thousands a month with an awesome world wide network that also includes pro gotomeeting accounts for each employee. They're less than half what they were paying and taxes also cheaper and no surprise fees... Message me or call me if you want a referral. I'm looking at jitsi as a way to help my daughter's connect with their teachers. I know zoom in what everyone is pushing now because it's just so easy but it also costs if you go over the minutes... Not much though. I wanted to offer free... Willing to hear any advice for integrating edX platform with jitsi
That's the problem. This is supposed to be the time for Jitsi to be widely used and is a credible and a privacy-respecting, open-source alternative to Zoom. But will it break out from the free and open source audiences and reach into the mainstream where Zoom is? I hope so and it should.
Open-source, iOS and Android apps, self-hosting, video chat and first class web client support are all attractive and competing required features to stand a chance against Zoom and aside from its technical merits, it just needs to be more aggressive in marketing itself to capture some mindshare. Or even the name its should be changed to something less clever and to a more user friendly one which could be a start...
I don't know the story behind the name, but I didn't realize it was clever and I do consider it very user friendly -- short, memorable, stands out, easy to pronounce.
I was looking at the Matrix clients yesterday, to set up a video chat room for elderly relatives. Everything seems just a bit too confusing or unpolished. I want something simple, functional and cross platform. At the moment I’m feeling Zoom with scheduled meeting times is probably the best bet. I’ll test this out, but does anyone have any other thoughts, or any non-proprietary recommendations?
We have a lot of experience working with Jitsi Meet, if anyone has questions integrating Jitsi, free to send me an email john@taskade.com. Happy to help!
I found that it had some issues with people connecting via the web clients. Is there a way to mitigate that or is that just expected with the software?
FWIW, it works great on my Chromebook, meeted up with myself on my Android. Even used x86 Bromite browser on Chromebook, and even blur background worked after a slight delay. Impressive.
I was wondering what would be the requirement for self-hosting Jitsi - in terms of server resources - bandwidth, CPU etc? Is the Video/VOIP transmitted client to client or does it get routed via the server? Thanks.
how many people were in it? I'm trying to set something up for my family to play Jackbox with more than 10 people, google hangouts caps out at 10 and I don't really want to make everyone set up the zoom app since I'll have to do tech support for everyone. (disclaimer: I work at Jackbox, I'm in charge of the multiplayer servers)
The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world of Javascript package managers.
Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.
Here's a better design, in text:
- Who are we? This is Jitsi Meet video conferencing
- How do I use it? Just type a name for your meeting in the box and get started, you'll be able to share from there.
The old line about "can someone's granny use?" this comes to mind. If I seem annoyed, I am, we need successful competitors to things like Zoom and Google but that means getting non-developers to use them.
I looked at Jitsi's website and Github yesterday and couldn't find any documentation. For example, it wasn't clear to me why I would want to run Videobridge, or what features Meet has.
> The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world of Javascript package managers.
> Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.
I think this is a little overly ageist but yeah - if you're not familiar with the kind of URLs generated by services like Gfycat then it looks pretty strange, and it's not really clear what's going on (why is it typing these strange words in the box?)
I wouldn't say that any individual 20 year old would be more or less considerate of people outside their social circle / age bracket than a 50 year old, of course, I even know some who are[0]. As a cohort though, I've no qualms!
[0] They don't develop single page apps using the trendiest Javascript frameworks though, maybe there's a self-selection link ;-)
Granny won’t set up a room, but you can send her a link on email or Whatsapp which can open the chat in a browser or redirect to an app download depending on platform, and also offer dial in options. That seems as intuitive as the process can be. The app also seems extremely straightforward. Granny usability is actually exactly what I’m looking for, and on first glance I’m impressed.
Have you tried it with a granny? Have you ever trained people in using computers?
I have, young and old, professionally, some of them grannies, and this does not cut the mustard by a long chalk. I can imagine a few ways to make it easier.
Absolutely this. We need alternatives to Zoom and Hangouts which can be used by non-developers which should "just work" which Jitisi does to some extent but unfortunately, Zoom is still in the lead with a reason.
End users were looking for software a while back to do remote work or tele-conferencing and first it was companies that were using Zoom or Hangouts. By the time I saw actors and the mainstream media were mentioning and using Zoom [0], its mindshare was established right there and Jitsi now has a lot of catching up to do.
I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience comparison:
Onboarding:
Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts.
Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality:
Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts.
Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout:
Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens.
Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.
> Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Hangouts (now Meet) is better geared towards GSuite orgs where you're already logged into Google since you have to be to access almost all of your other internal company/school resources, including gmail. It also solves the contacts problem since everyone will be in the company directory.
Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mirrored in Chat, but the video conferencing is still weirdly separate from Meet.
It's weirdly hidden but if you go to meet.google.com and make a meeting, others just need the url to join, no faffing about with connecting to other users in gmail. It needs a corporate gmail account to use though.
I'm not sure is deprecated.
If you're free (paid by your own data), Hangout is the 'consumer' version.
Meet is the paid platform, with more business oriented features.
That's the disheartening part. Most hadn't used Hangouts before, one person suggested it due to social distancing, ~1hr into Hangouts call as we're struggling to add another member I introduce Jitsi and paste a link into the group chat. Used for ~15 minutes, then dropped and the manual invite process for hangouts began again - organizer couldn't find the option to generate a sharable link to a Hangouts call (it does exist).
Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is awesome for a family/group of friends with iDevices.
Depends on how you are defining "worth" here. They are the only devices "worth" their price as evidenced by how well they hold their value and how much consumers are willing to pay for them. They are not "worth" the high price if you are valuing the internals (what GPU, processor, memory, HD you get).
I've ended up with multiple iPads over the years despite my best efforts. They definitely do stop working after a while. I've also noticed MacBooks get burning hot doing a video conference for more than 15 minutes. And I'm not a hardcore gamer, but my kids play Minecraft and it's fine by glitchy.
Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.
Now do me this favor: take your experience and opinion, and compare it to others. How many people share this with you? If the Acer was just that substantially better in terms of value and build quality, why isn't Acer the #1 laptop in the US? Why do so many companies, organizations, and developers not share this take with you? What may you be missing?
Hackintosh are hard to build, by any reasonable definition, even for an average HN users. It's possible some people find that easy, but surely it is much harder than following an even medium difficulty tutorial.
Have you tried building one before? I built mine for the first time in February with 0 prior experience with such things and followed this guide: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-...
If you're doing a config with a motherboard that's well used you can generally find the right configs to use. If you're using something not often used, you'll have trouble with the initial setup but once you get over that initial setup trouble in my experience everything will work and stay fine.
There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.
I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.
I'm now first time using Mac due to my project. It works fine, but I do prefer Linux for development. Hackintosh probably makes sense if you're stuck on some Mac software though.
Ironically I'm using Mac over Linux because I want to use parallels to run a windows application that I must use. I tried using VMware for a while but it drove me insane that everytime I switched workspaces it would exit fullscreen.
> Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile.
Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)
It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.
I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?).
It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.
I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again.
All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.
FaceTime has the best UX of all the solutions I've seen so far.
Seamless integration in the OS as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem and lightweight native clients (it seems to use hardware encoding/decoding does not make my fans spin like Zoom or any browser-based solution). No accounts or meeting/room IDs to remember or join, it just works with Apple IDs (which you're already logged into) or phone numbers for iOS devices (which work even if you somehow don't use an Apple ID).
Right. But I don’t want to have to tell a client to download an app. I’d rather they just go to a url like they do on an iPad. Not sure what the difference in browsers is between them, but I can’t imagine it’s much.
I proposed Zoom vs Jitsi Meet the other day for a virtual hangout with a group of friends. They initially wanted to try Zoom... because of the virtual backgrounds. Yup, that is what they wanted.
I just looked up virtual background and that is insanely cool and I totally get where your friends are coming from. I've got to give that a shot sometime - the kinds of features people can build are just so cool
I'd be far more willing to turn the video on in my calls of people weren't going to see the messy room in the background, and the calls I'm in have an awful lot of blank screens that would be better if people turned on there video for some face-to-face communication. I think it's less non-essential than you might imagine, this is a really well thought-out feature, and probably pretty technically challenging to implement too.
It isn't just a gimmick, it is a legit feature when working from home and you don't want everyone to see your messy kitchen or bedroom. Sadly the chrome app version you have to use for ChromeOS doesn't support that feature anyway :(
Confirming that it isn’t a gimmick. I have been working on distributed WFH Teams for the past 5 years now (long before COVID19) and this has been a consistent point of embarrassment and/or trouble with video conferencing. I can’t begin to tell you how many times we have had people that need extra time to prepare for a meeting because of the background. As a manager, I have had lots of personal conversations with employees who legitimately stress out about getting the computer into a place with a good background.
Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.
The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.
(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.
That blur looks great. Too bad I have literally never been able to successfully join a Teams call. Every single time we have to fall back to telephone.
That is odd. A large school I work with in the UK rolled out Teams as an emery year measure yesterday. Everyone was happily doing group video chats, no problem.
I think it works fine for people who have accounts set up. But if you get invited to a Teams (or Skype for Business) meeting, you are often required to log in with an account. This is very different from Zoom, which you can participate in without an account.
I have also been sent in infinite loops of download installer, install, now go download installer again.
>cheesy virtual backgrounds or blur real background
Seems like a stock slightly blurred image of a wall or bookshelf would be best option
The problem I have with the stock backgrounds is they impart a non-professional feel to the meeting....do i really want to show I’m mentally ‘sitting on the beach’ or ‘out in space’ while talking about who gets downsized?
Zoom refuses to allow virtual backgrounds without green screens, on non-Intel CPUs. I have a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 3700U CPU supporting AVX2 I think, but Zoom won't allow me to turn that feature on. I mentioned this in a chat room and people speculated Zoom was paid off by Intel.
I don’t really like Zoom, but I was on a call the other day with 3 other people calling from phones and iPads, all using virtual backgrounds. You don’t need beefy specs to use the feature.
Probably the other poster meant it requires a lot of CPU for you to have a virtual background, not for other people.
It wouldn't make sense for other people using the feature to take any more processing power--I assume the video is encoded and processed the same either way.
I think the OP meant that people using iPad and iPhone to call in also had virtual backgrounds, so concluded that it might not need as much CPU as the GP surmised.
Another poster mentioned though that Zoom required green screens for this feature on non-intel CPU machines.
I used this the other day in the free version. The text over the screen was annoying, and the background effect was rather glitchy, but it was effective at hiding the mess I was too lazy to clean up.
However, as we were using it for work conference, I felt like I was adding some goofiness to the call and didn't like that. I ended up moving the camera to show less mess, and then eventually actually cleaned up my mess.
I use it for a bunch of goofy stuff in meetings to lighten the mood. When I want to be serious, I change the background image to a photo of our office. If you combine it with OBS studio, you can overlay yourself on presentations or videos, which is also very useful.
IIRC classic Hangouts doesn't have the option to tile.
Meet (assuming you're on the current UI, which I would presume has been rolled out to everyone by now) can tile, but only up to four videos (excluding yourself, so five participants). Once you go above that, in automatic mode, it'll drop back to the view with a single large video of a person currently speaking, and smaller videos of everyone else on the side, and, if you force it into the grid view, only four are displayed at a time.
Meet has a setting that lets you choose how to see people. By default, it shows up to 4 people in equal tiles. After that, it puts the talker large and a few people in small tiles to the side.
But there's a layout option in the vertical dots menu that will let you force it back to 4 large tiles. You cannot specify how many tiles, though, it's always 4.
When you write 500 simultaneous users, do you mean:
1. 500 users making multiple calls across our servers at the same time?
2. 500 users on a single call?
It is based on WebRTC, so the actual video data doesn't pass through a central server. Google Duo uses this same technology. There _is_ a central server but that is just to glue all the handshakes together. The video/audio don't pass through it, it is all peer-to-peer, so scaling is more so on the client application and the available bandwidth. WebRTC dynamically changes the bitrate of the stream depending on connection though, so it should scale nicely.
I haven't tried a large conference on meet.jit.si yet though, only 1:1. But if there are performance issues it is likely the client application itself that needs performance tuning.
I'm curious... between Whereby and Jitsi and I assume other browser-based video solutions relying on WebRTC...
...how big is the barrier these days to building a "videoconferencing platform" supporting millions of people... that runs on a single server?
Because if you need to do is build a pretty website that essentially just keeps track of meeting names and the names and IP addresses of participants...
...while each client is P2P-streaming their full-res videostream while speaking or other participants have them pinned... and every other client is P2P-streaming a low-res videostream to power the thumbnails (and similar decisions about which computer is the main audio source and when, or picking a single peer to serve as the audio mixer)...
What else is there to do, really?
(I mean obviously there's fancy stuff you can add like screensharing, chat, authentication, etc... and browser-specific bugfixes and quirks presumably...)
But are we at a point where anyone can write a functional videoconferencing platform in a week, and platforms are differentiating mainly on nicer UX and extra features?
Or is there something huge I'm missing here, where implementing WebRTC is somehow a lot harder than it seems, and/or still requires server farms to route the streams through in certain cases?
It doesn't scale well beyond a handful of people. You need *N bandwidth to send and receive, and without a thing called 'simulcast' (creating multiple, different quality stream simultaneously) which doesn't have good browser support the quality is defined by the lowest common denominator. A central server solves many, many issues that result in better quality.
Jitsi itself barely works on Firefox and not at all on mobile devices (without their app).
It actually works fine on Android browsers (checked in FF and Chrome), you just have to load the page in Desktop mode so that it stops pushing the apps to you.
Hopefully they'll reconsider their decision if they want it to get popular...
I rolled https://video.etherpad.org out within 5 minutes. It's a single command once Etherpad is installed (npm install ep_webrtc).
There is one complication most people don't realize -- Failed Reverse NAT traversal: For this you need a TURN server (I'm intentionally ignoring STUN for obvious reasons).
TURN servers have to route the actual media (video / audio) from user a <> b <> c but only if the user(s) can't directly connect. We hit Tb's a day through our TURN server and it gets expensive.
But complexity wise, it's an absolute doddle! Give it a go, if you have nodejs installed 90% of your work is done!
Silly question, because I tried to run Nextcloud Talk and ran into odd connection issues for a user who I believe is behind a corporate firewall and so I needed to stand up “coturn”: what’s the obvious reason for avoiding STUN? And what would you recommend as the simplest/best TURN server implementation?
Hosting cost is the biggest barrier to building a video conferencing solution which scales to millions of users. We setup a Jitsi meet instance and with just 6 parties it pegged a core on the server CPU at 50%.
Admittedly one of the users was on Firefox which causes CPU load to spike with Jitsi but either way video conferencing is bandwidth and processor intensive.
Otherwise the WebRTC technology is stable and works well across browsers - especially for audio. Just scaling it and getting folks to pay for it so it’s economically feasible to host is another thing.
Bandwidth and processing power are limiting factors. Our department tried to run a large Big Blue Button instance to support a dozen of conferences at the same time, ranging from 10-150 participants, all day long.
The experience says: you need hardware (not virtual), starting from 32 cores and 64GB RAM, it turned out it was not enough, added another machine, then another machine, ... and more.
The main reasons for Zooms popularity (and in general the most important features of a videoconferencing software) are accessibility and reliability.
Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).
(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)
Zoom’s privacy issues are more than minor, if my friends started using it and I couldn’t get the web version to work I wouldn’t do a conference call with them.
Can I ask if you are using video conferencing in a business setting?
When folks are trying to get stuff done in tough circumstances NO ONE has ANY patience for the home built / funky / privacy enhanced multi-click setup. Especially not the top executives now dialing in from home who aren't tech forward. IT doesn't want to trouble shoot things either - all of a sudden you have 1000+ folks video conferencing.
I'd be interested in these dealbreaker privacy problems in the current client.
I used to use webex more, but zoom just had had some incredible mindshare growth. Its literally the first suggestion it seems when there is a problem with a conference setup. Latency is also good on zoom which makes the audio side nicer in my experience.
Super reliable. Our rather large company was all Skype all the time, but people started doing Zoom because it worked all the time. Now we're almost fully Zoom.
Exactly this. Zoom is crushing it here. Whatever negatives they are doing privacy side is paying of BIG time in ease of use.
Did a call recently, host wanted to google hangouts. 50% could not get in. Finally someone else said let's just use Zoom. 1 minute later we are all in. I think google doesn't work well with domains with hangouts meet blocked if you invite folks on those so they need to spin up a different account. Or people don't know meets is restricted to domain users only? Or get confused between hangouts / chat / meets etc. Something is wonky sometimes with google in terms of 5 solutions to one problem.
I wonder if anyone (who also has Zoom) could comment on how Jitsi actually compares to Zoom for 20+ people with full video? (since the title pits it against Zoom)
I'm seeing comments how how good Jitsi is, but can someone categorically say Jitsi is comparable to or better than Zoom?
The advantages of Zoom are ease of setup, smooth simultaneous video experience (tiled) for 20+ participants, and breakout rooms. The experience is so good that I was convinced to fork out my own money for a personal subscription. If Jitsi can do all of the above, I'd be inclined to try it out for my next meeting.
We started using BigBlueButton at the the University. I tried to teach and there is nothing in it that is specifically lecture focused, but if you just use it as videoconferencing tool with all microphones muted, it does the job for a one-way communication tool. Once students start asking questions it is too limited. The chat clutters soon, the option for raising hands or changing status is useless with large groups. I'd say that the whole interface is useful only for smaller groups up to 10 persons, definitely not above 100 persons.
I have not tried Zoom or Jitsi Meet in such settings and can't compare. They both have some useful options and slightly more options than Big Blue Button (like the Youtube streaming in Jitsi Meet that will save bandwidth).
It's very disheartening that when you try to connect with firefox, it says you should use chrome. This is a direct stab in the heart of the people who would favor it over zoom because it is free software.
AFAIK Firefox on GNU/Linux uses Gstreamer. Maybe you need to install gstreamer codec packages.
Update: Firefox switched to FFmpeg and removed Gstreamer support some time ago. I have FFmpeg installed from rpmfusion, but I don't know if that's relevant to WebRTC and Jitsi.
It works on Firefox but does not have simulcast support so whenever someone on Firefox joins, other devices have to use vastly more CPU and bandwidth. My phone dropped 50% battery in 10 minutes with a Firefox user on.
It is being worked on [1].
Firefox was a supported browser but they took it off the list in January until this issue is fixed. [2]
As others have said, this seems to be a Firefox issue, once you get a larger number of participants in a call it becomes unusable with a single firefox user.
I have actually considered running an instance of jitsi meet where I block out all non-chrome browsers. I don't like it, but if you pragmatically want something that works...
I really feel in this situation Mozilla should put all resources on fixing issues like these.
And here I am, opening Chrome just so I can join audio in Zoom conference. For some reason it says "Your browser does not support using the computer’s Audio device" and recommends Chrome.
To the authors, if they see this: I'm trying to use this to call my mother and we are both just looking at our own faces. I've confirmed -- via separate video call on phones -- that we're at the same URL, both look connected, and both have camera permissions. There's no indication that anything is wrong on either of our computers.
In Firefox, if you click the 3-dots and then "Request desktop site", it let's you use the website for video conferencing... (which should be the default even for mobile)
I was wondering just now why in the midst of all this remote working boom Jitsi Meet is seldom mention. Jitsi Meet has been absolutely stellar every time I've used it. Great interface, not bloated even when running in a browser with 10+ other people, plenty of options to manage conferences with many people (raise-your-hand button, selective muting/soloing, etc). Creating a chat is as easy as typing a name and hitting enter, no account needed! And getting somebody to join is as simple as clicking a link to meet.jitsi.net/yourchatroomname.
On top of that it's open source and end to end encrypted.
Jitsi meet is not end-to-end encrypted [1]. Rather, it is encrypted with TLS between the client and the server, which doesn’t provide the same security/privacy benefit at all.
The website says it’s “fully encrypted,” which I think is misleading.
Edit: WebRTC does not support end-to-end encryption for multiple peers. This means it’s impossible for any browser-supported videoconferencing platform to support e2e encryption, including Zoom and Jitsi. This is where Jitsi actually has a unique advantage - it can be self hosted, which offers the same security benefits as e2e encryption.
Signaling is indeed over HTTPS and media is encrypted with DTLS-SRTP.
No browsers today support end-to-end encryption for multiparty calls.
The advantage that Jitsi offers there is that you can stand it up on your own server in just a few minutes and get protection that is equivalent to end-to-end encryption.
292 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadThese things are subjective but if enough people hate it, perhaps it’s important to look into it.
Goes to show how important it is to do user research on a broad swath of the population to make sure you have branding that isn't off-putting to a significant subset of people.
Still subjective but let’s compare Jitsi brand with something from https://www.cghnyc.com/
There is certainly a huge difference even though it’s not a quantitative measure.
Jitsi brand just sucks so bad. :(
() Interestingly, I too have for the first time looked up the etymology and feel uncomfortable; I think because I've only ever heard it before, and assumed it was spelled differently like "Jipped" or something https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/30/242429836...
jitsi seems quite tame compared to both of those.
If we're going to make names be the cover of the book, then we must all realize that almost any name will be uncomfortable to some audiences.
SIP Communicator is renamed Jitsi (from the Bulgarian “жици”, or “wires”), since it now also supports audio and video over XMMP’s Jingle extensions and it would be silly to still call it SIP Communicator.
Come to think of it, this may be why Linux is still seen as an outsider to non-technical people, as though it were less of a serious product than Windows (which has an English word as a name).
Think of Windows or macOS, pick a version, you can picture what it looks like and what apps run on it. Linux isn't a specific product. You can't install Linux 10.15. You might install a specific kernel version, or a specific distro version, but Linux is more of an assemblage of packages rather than one cohesive end-product. And it's not as easy to picture Linux in your mind. One Linux user will use default Ubuntu installation, one Linux user will boot directly to terminal because window managers, and other Linux user will be using Android which is completely different case as well.
This thread is quite idiotic.
The main pain point was that I had to force everyone to download Jitsi and connect to my XMPP server...
Excited to see they're still doing cool stuff!
[1]Technically the XMPP server is just session management.
Are there more details?
Footer of https://jitsi.org/
Well, if there's only 2, maybe 3 of you – anything beyond that is going to use a server to host the call for reliability.
Do you mean for more than 3 - the call/video is routed through the server and would consume server bandwidth? If so how is jitsi paying for all this if it is free?
Jitsi is proudly powered by an awesome open source community — and 8×8.
8x8 looks like a commercial product based on Jitsi: https://www.8x8.com/
My firm used to use them. Their tech was rock solid but clunky for our stack so we switched to RingCentral. Quality isn’t as good, and I wonder often if we made a mistake.
You can give our app a try at https://www.taskade.com/new (no registration needed, mobile and desktop)
Open to any feedback!
Open-source, iOS and Android apps, self-hosting, video chat and first class web client support are all attractive and competing required features to stand a chance against Zoom and aside from its technical merits, it just needs to be more aggressive in marketing itself to capture some mindshare. Or even the name its should be changed to something less clever and to a more user friendly one which could be a start...
I have not seen anything better than these unfortunately in the open source world that is as accessible or easy to use as those two.
Here is the supported list:
https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/modules/...
For example, Brave Browser is still not fully supported:
https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/3978
(Video doesn’t work on either, but that’s documented)
This may be helpful:
- https://community.jitsi.org/t/integrate-jitsi-meet-in-existi...
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-jitsi-meet
You can check out our demos here:
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/taskade-manage-anything/id1264...
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.taskade.mo...
For the people who it was working for we didn't have a lot of issues. I'm not sure how the audio went through.(Btw this was on linux)
Is Jackbox still chicago based, or is that only the jellyvision side?
1. https://meet.jit.si/
2. https://jitsi.org/news/introducing-presenter-mode/
2) Start a channel
3) Bottom left there's a monitor icon to share your screen
Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.
Here's a better design, in text:
- Who are we? This is Jitsi Meet video conferencing - How do I use it? Just type a name for your meeting in the box and get started, you'll be able to share from there.
The old line about "can someone's granny use?" this comes to mind. If I seem annoyed, I am, we need successful competitors to things like Zoom and Google but that means getting non-developers to use them.
Zoom also suffers from the non-intuitive problem so I was hoping for something a bit better on that front.
> Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means nothing to anyone but developers.
I think this is a little overly ageist but yeah - if you're not familiar with the kind of URLs generated by services like Gfycat then it looks pretty strange, and it's not really clear what's going on (why is it typing these strange words in the box?)
[0] They don't develop single page apps using the trendiest Javascript frameworks though, maybe there's a self-selection link ;-)
Have you tried it with a granny? Have you ever trained people in using computers?
I have, young and old, professionally, some of them grannies, and this does not cut the mustard by a long chalk. I can imagine a few ways to make it easier.
End users were looking for software a while back to do remote work or tele-conferencing and first it was companies that were using Zoom or Hangouts. By the time I saw actors and the mainstream media were mentioning and using Zoom [0], its mindshare was established right there and Jitsi now has a lot of catching up to do.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-51999522/coronaviru...
Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens. Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.
Hangouts (now Meet) is better geared towards GSuite orgs where you're already logged into Google since you have to be to access almost all of your other internal company/school resources, including gmail. It also solves the contacts problem since everyone will be in the company directory.
Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mirrored in Chat, but the video conferencing is still weirdly separate from Meet.
You do not require a google account at all to join a Meets session, but someone in the session with a valid invite will have to approve your entry.
I test this quite often with incognito tabs to have multiple participants for room setup and testing.
... but why? Is it just a familiarity thing?
That's the disheartening part. Most hadn't used Hangouts before, one person suggested it due to social distancing, ~1hr into Hangouts call as we're struggling to add another member I introduce Jitsi and paste a link into the group chat. Used for ~15 minutes, then dropped and the manual invite process for hangouts began again - organizer couldn't find the option to generate a sharable link to a Hangouts call (it does exist).
"I don't like it, it's weird."
To be fair, it is sort "busy" in regards to the UI and the stuff surrounding the screen.
Hangouts is comparatively less daunting.
[0] - https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...
Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.
There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.
I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.
Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)
Madness.
It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.
I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?). It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.
I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again. All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.
Seamless integration in the OS as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem and lightweight native clients (it seems to use hardware encoding/decoding does not make my fans spin like Zoom or any browser-based solution). No accounts or meeting/room IDs to remember or join, it just works with Apple IDs (which you're already logged into) or phone numbers for iOS devices (which work even if you somehow don't use an Apple ID).
But I imagine if your friends aren't nerds this is a real problem. My wife has to deal with it.
I shall suggest Jitsi Meet again soon ;).
Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.
The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.
Here is what the Microsoft Teams one looks like: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/blur-your-backgroun...
(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.
I have also been sent in infinite loops of download installer, install, now go download installer again.
Seems like a stock slightly blurred image of a wall or bookshelf would be best option
The problem I have with the stock backgrounds is they impart a non-professional feel to the meeting....do i really want to show I’m mentally ‘sitting on the beach’ or ‘out in space’ while talking about who gets downsized?
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/210707503
It wouldn't make sense for other people using the feature to take any more processing power--I assume the video is encoded and processed the same either way.
Another poster mentioned though that Zoom required green screens for this feature on non-intel CPU machines.
However, as we were using it for work conference, I felt like I was adding some goofiness to the call and didn't like that. I ended up moving the camera to show less mess, and then eventually actually cleaned up my mess.
Plus, VCam only works in Windows.
Where is the option in hangouts to tile equally? I've never found it and I hate the large speaker small others in some situations.
Meet (assuming you're on the current UI, which I would presume has been rolled out to everyone by now) can tile, but only up to four videos (excluding yourself, so five participants). Once you go above that, in automatic mode, it'll drop back to the view with a single large video of a person currently speaking, and smaller videos of everyone else on the side, and, if you force it into the grid view, only four are displayed at a time.
There is no gallery view available for Google Hangouts (I've searched heavily for it in the past week, if it exists please enlighten me).
But there's a layout option in the vertical dots menu that will let you force it back to 4 large tiles. You cannot specify how many tiles, though, it's always 4.
I like to call this the "Hollywood Squares" view.
https://www.google.com/search?q=hollywood+squares
1. Wow, 2. Anything special required to pull that off?
And their connections sucked
But my Jitsi instance was fine
I haven't tried a large conference on meet.jit.si yet though, only 1:1. But if there are performance issues it is likely the client application itself that needs performance tuning.
It's scaled quite well for us, though.
He wrote up a guide to getting it working on Centos.
https://antipaucity.com/2020/03/20/basic-dockerized-jitsi-de...
...how big is the barrier these days to building a "videoconferencing platform" supporting millions of people... that runs on a single server?
Because if you need to do is build a pretty website that essentially just keeps track of meeting names and the names and IP addresses of participants...
...while each client is P2P-streaming their full-res videostream while speaking or other participants have them pinned... and every other client is P2P-streaming a low-res videostream to power the thumbnails (and similar decisions about which computer is the main audio source and when, or picking a single peer to serve as the audio mixer)...
What else is there to do, really?
(I mean obviously there's fancy stuff you can add like screensharing, chat, authentication, etc... and browser-specific bugfixes and quirks presumably...)
But are we at a point where anyone can write a functional videoconferencing platform in a week, and platforms are differentiating mainly on nicer UX and extra features?
Or is there something huge I'm missing here, where implementing WebRTC is somehow a lot harder than it seems, and/or still requires server farms to route the streams through in certain cases?
Jitsi itself barely works on Firefox and not at all on mobile devices (without their app).
Basically, it's a known issue [0] and the response is that maybe it'll get fixed eventually :(
[0] https://community.jitsi.org/t/browser-support-warning-when-u...
EDIT: It seems firefox-stable works OK.
Hopefully they'll reconsider their decision if they want it to get popular...
There is one complication most people don't realize -- Failed Reverse NAT traversal: For this you need a TURN server (I'm intentionally ignoring STUN for obvious reasons).
TURN servers have to route the actual media (video / audio) from user a <> b <> c but only if the user(s) can't directly connect. We hit Tb's a day through our TURN server and it gets expensive.
But complexity wise, it's an absolute doddle! Give it a go, if you have nodejs installed 90% of your work is done!
Your site is currently down, but it does does not show a AAAA record for video.etherpad.org
Like SDP offers between browsers which support different codecs.
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Just install it and video conferencing is one of the free features out of the box
All you do is call Q.Streams.WebRTC.start()
Admittedly one of the users was on Firefox which causes CPU load to spike with Jitsi but either way video conferencing is bandwidth and processor intensive.
Otherwise the WebRTC technology is stable and works well across browsers - especially for audio. Just scaling it and getting folks to pay for it so it’s economically feasible to host is another thing.
Jitsi have some good videos about autoscaling/load balancing Jitsi Meet here: https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/
The experience says: you need hardware (not virtual), starting from 32 cores and 64GB RAM, it turned out it was not enough, added another machine, then another machine, ... and more.
I can't give more details.
Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).
(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)
When folks are trying to get stuff done in tough circumstances NO ONE has ANY patience for the home built / funky / privacy enhanced multi-click setup. Especially not the top executives now dialing in from home who aren't tech forward. IT doesn't want to trouble shoot things either - all of a sudden you have 1000+ folks video conferencing.
I'd be interested in these dealbreaker privacy problems in the current client.
Did a call recently, host wanted to google hangouts. 50% could not get in. Finally someone else said let's just use Zoom. 1 minute later we are all in. I think google doesn't work well with domains with hangouts meet blocked if you invite folks on those so they need to spin up a different account. Or people don't know meets is restricted to domain users only? Or get confused between hangouts / chat / meets etc. Something is wonky sometimes with google in terms of 5 solutions to one problem.
I'm seeing comments how how good Jitsi is, but can someone categorically say Jitsi is comparable to or better than Zoom?
The advantages of Zoom are ease of setup, smooth simultaneous video experience (tiled) for 20+ participants, and breakout rooms. The experience is so good that I was convinced to fork out my own money for a personal subscription. If Jitsi can do all of the above, I'd be inclined to try it out for my next meeting.
I have not tried Zoom or Jitsi Meet in such settings and can't compare. They both have some useful options and slightly more options than Big Blue Button (like the Youtube streaming in Jitsi Meet that will save bandwidth).
Can confirm Firefox-dev on Linux has no working video.
iOS doesn’t support videoconferencing in the browser - you have to download the app.
Works fine though not tested mic(muted on system).
AFAIK Firefox on GNU/Linux uses Gstreamer. Maybe you need to install gstreamer codec packages.
Update: Firefox switched to FFmpeg and removed Gstreamer support some time ago. I have FFmpeg installed from rpmfusion, but I don't know if that's relevant to WebRTC and Jitsi.
(from a desktop Linux user years 1996-2004)
It is being worked on [1].
Firefox was a supported browser but they took it off the list in January until this issue is fixed. [2]
[1] https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758#issuecomment...
[2] https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/pull/5017
[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629443-Zoom-Web...
I have actually considered running an instance of jitsi meet where I block out all non-chrome browsers. I don't like it, but if you pragmatically want something that works...
I really feel in this situation Mozilla should put all resources on fixing issues like these.
p.s. Discord has no problems with my audio
Nothing to download, if you don't want to
On top of that it's open source and end to end encrypted.
Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a happy user.
The website says it’s “fully encrypted,” which I think is misleading.
[1] https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/README.md#se...
Edit: WebRTC does not support end-to-end encryption for multiple peers. This means it’s impossible for any browser-supported videoconferencing platform to support e2e encryption, including Zoom and Jitsi. This is where Jitsi actually has a unique advantage - it can be self hosted, which offers the same security benefits as e2e encryption.