Ask HN: Best Technology for an E-Christmas Get Together?

2 points by catherd 5y ago ↗ HN

This Christmas my family plans to hang out in a videoconference while also streaming something we recorded earlier. There seem to be quite a few ways to theoretically achieve this. Looking for advice on a reliable, pain-free method from anyone with experience.

Ideally something that:

- does not require users to sign up, install anything, or a specific OS (for example: go to a custom URL and everything works through the browser without any sort of sign-in)

- allows videoconference-like features

- can stream a pre-recorded video to everyone

- reliable

- minimal setup

7 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread

dylz 5y ago ↗

https://hubs.mozilla.com/

catherd 5y ago ↗

Thank you.

Can you comment on how reliable it is?

It seems to have a limit of 24 users, and says it might not work on mobile past 10 users.

dylz 5y ago ↗

It works well past 10 users on very high powered mobile. Less so on cheap phones.

It's really more that you are spraying high volume websocket and webrtc data continuously while doing realtime 3D/WebGL - you are practically running a full game at this point.

catherd 5y ago ↗

After reading through the documentation and poking around in the UI, I didn't see any way for participants to stream their webcams. Do you know if that's possible?

I don't think we want a VR teleconference, we want to see each other.

dylz 5y ago ↗

Here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-your-camera-or-sc...

It is a pliable in-game object, you can throw someone's screen, resize it, etc.

g3houdini 5y ago ↗

zoom has been the best for this since most have accounts. They are also free unlimited calls during xmas. Curious what others have found?

rendx 5y ago ↗

BigBlueButton fits the bill and is open source too. You need to find a server that allows you to run the conference but there should be plenty.