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Zoom Alternatives for Longer Meetings?

15 points by 999900000999 ↗ HN
Before I start this, this desperately needs to be something a normal person can install.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been teaching one of my best friends how to program. I've known him for well over a decade and this has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

However, zoom, unless you want to pay for it will kick you out after 40 minutes.

We then tried to switch to Google meet. The experience was so bad, we gave up and went back to Zoom.

24 comments

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z3
Company ~50 people uses Hangout/meeting/ or however google calls it now. All good. They’ve improved massively, you should give another try
sssggg
Jitsi Meet. They can just paste a url into their browser and that's it.

https://meet.jit.si/

nonrandomstring
Jitsi beats everything. I've set up meetings with first-timers and total technophobes by sending a single URL. The UI and performance is no worse than any other contender like Zoom or Teams. Nobody I've connected with using Jitsi had any problems figuring the "intuitive" interface in a few seconds.

The URL can be an ordinary long string or random sequence like

http://meet.jit.si/somerandomplaceontheinternettomeetme

Remember though: meet.jit.si, like other WebRTC video conferencing tools is nothing but a coordination point/SIP, a rendezvous server that then connects you peer-to-peer via the protocol for 1-2-1 calls or a Videobridge for groups. Unlike Teams and Zoom though, you can set up your own, which is a significant security and performance value-add.

thenthenthen
How is jitsi between asia (cn) and europa and us?
nonrandomstring
Only ever done one or two US-UK links. Very good results IIRC.

When Jitsi (WebRTC) struggles it seems to do a sensible thing and fall back to preserving good audio but temporarily dropping the video completely.

smashed
Since it is browser based (webrtc), the implementation is mostly browser based. You can expect the same audio/video as you get with google meet or teams, which are using the same tech.

One or one calls should be using direct peer to peer connection thanks to webrtc.

Group calls will be routed by the server, so latency will be an issue depending on the server location.

laveur
Have you considered Webex? The newer versions are a lot more comprehensive and more akin to say Telegram or Slack.
badrabbit
Use Matrix, Element supports jitsi or whatever the vid/screensharing thing is. Works nicely.
andyrewwer
For coding and pairing is recommend pop. The successor to screen hero.
bvrmn
> We then tried to switch to Google meet. The experience was so bad, we gave up and went back to Zoom.

It's an interesting story to hear about.

bsg75
Does it have to be a video feed? Since you are teaching programming, there are multiple options to share editor sessions where the text is viewable on both ends. Then all you need is a voice channel.

VSCode has a live sharing extension (https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share), and there are some editors with this functionality built-in such as SubEthaEdit for Mac. If memory serves there’s even a Vim plug-in.

Looks like there’s a few online services dedicated to doing this in a browser: https://codeshare.io

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wkdneidbwf
if you don’t need video, vscode live share is pretty good.