[HN Gopher] Jitsi Meet features update
___________________________________________________________________
Jitsi Meet features update
Author : jrepinc
Score : 437 points
Date : 2020-04-08 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jitsi.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jitsi.org)
| jka wrote:
| Random fact: the 'Big Buck Bunny'[1] short film that the
| presenter shares during the screen-and-audio-sharing demo was
| made by the Blender Foundation[2], an organization that develops
| open and free content creation tools.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny
|
| [2] - https://blender.org/foundation/
| saghul wrote:
| I didn't choose it at random ;-)
| jordigh wrote:
| BBB has kind of become the Lena of video testing, but I've
| always been more partial to Sintel myself.
|
| https://durian.blender.org/download/
| znpy wrote:
| The banner complaining about not using google chrome (or
| derivative) is immensely annoying.
|
| I am using it on firefox and it works anyway, but now my mom is
| being forced to use it for work and she's asking whether there
| are any problems (there aren't).
|
| they should just take it away already, it's working well anyway.
| lima wrote:
| This is not true, the whole conference performs significantly
| worse at much higher bandwidth usage if there is a Firefox
| client, due to implementation limitations.
| keidjfks wrote:
| In other words, your experience might be good with Firefox,
| but it's worse for the others.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Their documentations and many other places state that Firefox
| uses roughly 2x the amount of resources, so I think it's worth
| pointing that to the user if they are having resource issues.
| walljm wrote:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1600698 and
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823 document
| the performance issues. Mozilla is working on the issue, but
| its not yet resolved.
| DenseComet wrote:
| There are known issues with Firefox clients causing
| deteriorated quality for all users. They're working on it, but
| current workarounds are use Chromium, a chromium based browser,
| or the desktop app.
|
| https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
| electriclove wrote:
| Sharing system audio sounds great! I'm hoping this makes using
| things like Jackbox better.
| sheidavanesa wrote:
| ok
| miloignis wrote:
| Awesome new feature! That's exactly what I'm going to use it
| for, though I am just a tad sad that it happened before my
| setup game night, as I felt like a wizard using pulseaudio to
| route the game audio through as a microphone...
| [deleted]
| CrankyBear wrote:
| I want to like Jitsi, but I can't. I've been testing it out on a
| variety of servers, bare-metal and cloud with Debian and CentOS.
| Regardless of platform, it doesn't scale, it eats memory like
| peanuts, and can saturate even 10GbE network connections. The
| service, as opposed to the server, clearly works well. But, the
| service doesn't have anything like the load that Zoom, Teams,
| Hangouts, etc. must deal with.
| _-___________-_ wrote:
| I've been helping quite a few people set up Jitsi lately. The
| software works reasonably well, although documentation is
| lacking and a lot of configuration options are named terribly,
| but one thing I've noticed is people's expectations about
| bandwidth usage are way lower than actuality, especially
| outbound from the server. But a bit of napkin math suggests
| that Jitsi isn't doing anything fundamentally inefficient here;
| one high-res stream plus N low-res streams transmitted to N
| participants is just a _lot_ of bandwidth.
| nemoniac wrote:
| Please tell us what the config options should be.
| jka wrote:
| It could be worth reporting some feedback to them directly, if
| you haven't already?
|
| They're quite responsive on GitHub (
| https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet ) and I'm sure additional
| details regarding any bottlenecks would be appreciated.
|
| Identifying even modest improvements now could result in large
| memory and bandwidth resource savings over the next few weeks
| and months.
| CrankyBear wrote:
| Done. I'm working with them to hammer things out.
| fleetside72 wrote:
| I haven't tried this at scale, but was pleased with 6
| participants on my $200 r710 hardware with 10megabits upload
| connection service. Memory usage is minimal, couple GB tops.
| Not running high-res, but was good enough. I mean they develop
| this and make it freely available for self-host, I'm pleased.
| spditner wrote:
| There are a few of things to be aware of when deploying your
| own instance in jitsi-meet/config.js:
|
| Firefox simulcast is still experimental (edit: and disabled by
| default), so Firefox is only sending HD to the video-bridge and
| no LD stream. The HD is then relayed to everyone even as a
| thumbnail.
|
| If you don't need to see everyone's video all the time, set
| channelLastN: 5 or a similar number, and only the last N
| speakers video will be broadcast
|
| If you don't need 720p (1280x720), change the constraints:
| video section to be something like 360p (640x360)
|
| Enable layer suspension so that HD is not sent to the server
| when not needed: enableLayerSuspension: true
| manquer wrote:
| What is you setup look like ? If you have largely 1:1 meetings
| you can enable p2p mode only , video will directly be shared
| between users. I have had no problems delivering 100-150
| concurrent sessions at ~1 Gbps per bridge, beyond that we
| usually cluster the bridge ( Octo is out of the box solution
| jitsi uses for this)
| xiii1408 wrote:
| Why is that? Is each of the participants audio/video going over
| the server so that you need p^2 bandwidth? Are there cool P2P
| tricks they are/could be using?
|
| I've been wondering about videoconferencing scale, since Zoom
| seems to have handled a huge explosion in usage very well. Are
| they just very good at autoscaling AWS instances, or do they
| use cool tricks to reduce bandwidth?
| quicklyfrozen wrote:
| The server is receiving 1 stream per participant, and
| forwarding that stream to all other participants. So for say
| 10 participants, that's 10 inbound and 90 outbound.
|
| If you switched to p2p instead, then each participant would
| need to send 10 streams instead of 1, and most people's
| upload bandwidth is much lower than their download (at least
| in the US).
|
| It's possible for the server to make decisions on which video
| streams to forward (e.g. last x talkers) to reduce the number
| of outbound streams, but switching streams takes a bit of
| time (you'll need to get a new iframe from the just-switched-
| on participant) which affects the interactivity of the
| session.
|
| Modern video codecs also allow for layering of into
| progressive levels of enhancement, so lower detail versions
| of the stream can be forwarded to participants will lower
| bandwidth without the server needing to transcode anything.
| (Not sure if Jitsi has implemented anything like that.)
| jakear wrote:
| Couldn't the server compose the streams itself? Perhaps as
| simple as tiling them all together and the client can
| manage that stream, or request single high quality streams
| if needed.
|
| There'd be a CPU/bandwidth tradeoff being made here, I
| wonder how the prices on standard cloud providers would
| compare.
| berkes wrote:
| If you have money, scaling resources like bandwith is as
| simple as 'paying bigger AWS bills'.
| dstryr wrote:
| I am so happy Jitsi exists. My friends and I have a room that we
| regularly pop into to say hi or play games together.
|
| The mobile app I downloaded through F-Droid works incredibly
| well, and for those of you Firefox users who aren't having the
| best experience, I recommend using the Electron desktop app
| [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases].
|
| I've been using the Jitsi Electron app in conjunction with OBS +
| the VirtualCam plugin to share games, videos and my desktop.
| Hopefully I can convert more Zoom users.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Passing by just to say I <3 Jitsi. (being a user for no more than
| a month now)
|
| That pop-up alert that tells you that you are speaking while on
| mute is incredibly smart.
| allset_ wrote:
| Google Meets has this as well, don't Zoom and others?
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| I don't know. I've never seen the feature in other products.
| darkwater wrote:
| Nice to hear about the simplified device chooser, I used Jitsi a
| few days ago for the first time for a family call and I lost like
| 2 minutes to realize where to change the mic input.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Over the past three weeks I've tried a few different conferencing
| solutions, including jitsi. I'll give it another try with this
| update.
|
| My use case is I take weekly music lessons, and now they are
| virtual. The problem is the DSP done on audio was designed for
| speech. If my teacher is explaining something then plays an
| example on his bass, it usually sounds terrible, maybe even
| inaudible.
|
| I send him pre-recorded mp3s of cover songs; ideally he could
| listen to it and I could comment in real time about places where
| things could be improved. Instead, if he is playing any music on
| his system, I hear nothing -- no music, no talk. It seems like
| the software thinks "Hey, this participant is listening to non-
| conference audio, so I'll just mute him (at least on skype). I'd
| love there to be a half duplex audio button so none of the DSP
| shenanigans are needed, and a high quality audio stream would be
| sent.
| saghul wrote:
| We don't have a way to turn these on from the UI, but here is
| how you can disable all audio processing:
|
| https://meet.jit.si/YourRoonNameHere#config.disableAP=true
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Thanks for the quick reply. I'll be trying it out tonight.
| vitro wrote:
| We hold regular flute meetings and play together. In this
| quarantine time we wanted to meet online, but if we play all
| at once, it seems I cannot hear everyone else at the same
| time. I guess it is as if everyone was shouting over everyone
| else, which is not the case when you have a meeting where
| usually only one person speaks at a time
|
| Will this also fix this issue? So everyone will be able to
| hear everyone?
| gnud wrote:
| You won't be able to play together because of latency.
|
| You will think you are in time with someone, but you will
| react when you hear/see them on your screen, which is maybe
| .15 seconds after they actually made the sound/movement.
| And then they will hear/see your reaction .15 seconds later
| again.
| lmm wrote:
| Musicians already deal with that kind of issue when doing
| particular kinds of performance (e.g. famously at
| Wagner's festival opera house, where the orchestra is in
| a deep pit below the singers).
| tpolzer wrote:
| If all participants have good internet and are
| geographically close it should theoretically be possible
| to have delay not much greater than rtt/2 for everybody.
|
| With rtt < 20ms that should make musical performances
| possible. After all, sound only travels less than four
| meters in 10ms. So this is just like singing in a choir
| (with more visual delay - but that can be solved by
| having a conductor).
|
| Unfortunately I'm not aware of any software making that a
| practical reality, even with ftth.
| lachenmayer wrote:
| You're assuming that network latency is the only latency
| that's involved here, but a huge latency source is the
| audio codec. Opus adds ~20ms latency, and that's the most
| low latency codec that's widely supported at the moment.
| You can see a comparison here: https://www.opus-
| codec.org/comparison/
|
| There are all sorts of other latency that need to be
| taken into consideration too, and unfortunately in
| practice those do add up to live music being unplayable
| on pretty much any network.
|
| There's a really interesting project called NINJAM
| https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/ which is designed for live
| music jam sessions. It flips this fundamental constraint
| on its head - instead of being real-time, it streams
| everyone else's output delayed by one bar (theoretically
| any interval >RTT I guess?). I haven't tried it, but it's
| a really cool idea.
| telesilla wrote:
| Firstly, thanks for your work on what is really a great
| project. Can we set stereo=1 in the SDP and also the
| bandwidth constraint? That would make it ideal for this use
| case.
|
| For music quality webRTC you need 3 things: disable audio
| processing, stereo=1 in the SDP and a way to limit bandwidth
| usage so it doesn't saturate the available bandwidth and
| create errors.
|
| Disabling video is also really the best thing to do when
| recording for this reason (bandwidth saturation), and also
| Chromium will give you much superior experience. Safari and
| Firefox isn't quite there yet: Safari can't let you choose
| your output device and lacks some other useful features, and
| Firefox doesn't yet seem to allow stereo Opus, maybe that's
| changed since I tested. Microsoft Edge is now Chromium so
| you're good to go.
| padenot wrote:
| Firefox has supported stereo opus for a very long time
| (four years at least?). We know it works, it's used by
| medical professionals for their job and they wrote a
| message a few month thanking us for this feature, that
| doesn't seem to work on other browser (according to them,
| but I see tickets open on chromium).
|
| Of course all the chain has to be stereo, that goes without
| saying: input signal is stereo, negotiation has been done
| in stereo, having enough bandwidth is important (otherwise
| opus goes mono), and then playback has to be on stereo
| hardware (but that's the easy part).
| [deleted]
| jpdus wrote:
| On Zoom you can activate raw, non-preprocessed sound. (I never
| tried it and don't know whether it works well for music)
| xiii1408 wrote:
| Awesome! I've been wondering how to do this, since I normally
| take calls in a quiet room with headphones, so there's no
| need for noise canceling. It would be nice if you could
| enable this on a per-call basis, though.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Here is how to enable this Zoom feature ("Preserve Original
| Sound"):
|
| https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-
| us/articles/115003279466-Prese...
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| Bear (rar!) in mind this will only work if you have the
| uplink bandwidth to do so.
| loeg wrote:
| "High"-bitrate lossy CBR compression is probably acceptable
| enough -- at least compared with a voice codec! mp3 at max
| (320) is only 320 kB/s, doesn't have the security issues
| that variable-bitrate compression does, and preserves audio
| "ok" (it does delete the high frequencies above 20-22 kHz).
| No patent issues anymore, either.
|
| Ogg-Vorbis may be an even better option for all kinds of
| reasons, but mp3 is more universally recognized.
| clarry wrote:
| MP3 and Vorbis have bad latency.
|
| There's not much reason not to use Opus, which has better
| quality/bitrate and lower latency.
| pedrocr wrote:
| Supposedly Opus supersedes all other codecs at all bit
| rates:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)#/media/
| Fil...
|
| It should be a matter of giving it enough bandwidth and
| let it make good decisions based on that.
| montroser wrote:
| Audio processing is a risky move -- so hard to get right. We've
| been using https://team.video at work, and one thing I
| absolutely love about it is how they handle audio / muting.
|
| When you're speaking, you don't have to wonder if others can
| hear you because your microphone pulses in green visually as
| you speak. If your audio isn't working it shows in yellow with
| no pulsing, and you and everyone else can see your audio is not
| flowing.
|
| Also, if someone else forgot to mute and their kid is making a
| ruckus, you can just mute them. You don't have to wait for a
| moment to interject and ask them verbally, you can just go
| ahead and do it.
|
| Or, when you see someone else in their video feed trying to
| speak up, but they forgot to unmute, you just unmute them. No
| everyone saying, "you're muted" over each other.
|
| It takes a second to get used to the idea that everyone has all
| the power, but in practice it just makes everything go way
| smoother.
| kosinus wrote:
| Unmuting others sounds like a scary feature. You don't want
| someone to unmute you without your knowledge.
| montroser wrote:
| It's only scary in the same way that it's scary how anyone
| walking down the street could kick you in the pants when
| you're walking down the street.
|
| They _could_ but they won 't because we live in a society.
| Which is great because that means we don't have to walk
| around in steel suits to avoid getting kicked in the pants.
|
| I choose to trust the people I work with every day. And
| then as a bonus, I don't have to hear people yelling
| "you're muted!" at one another. We just get on with it.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Use TeamTalk[1]. If you need high audio quality, TT beats
| everything else you can find, maybe except very expensive
| software for radio stations. I've successfully used it to
| stream music and it works.
|
| It's Teamspeak and Discord like, so you need to connect to a
| server, either public or self-hosted, join or create a channel,
| and then you will be able to talk to everyone on that channel.
| This is perfect for permanent communities where people just
| hang out, but works for one-offs too. It works on Windows,
| Linux, Mac, iOS and Android, no web access. The server is also
| available for Raspberry Pi. Half of it is open-source, but the
| core SDK needs a license if you're developing with it. The
| program itself is free, even for commercial use.
|
| It uses Opus and lets you adjust the quality and processing, so
| you can get a lot out of it. We've been using it in our
| community for about 10 years now, including for radio
| broadcasting, and we haven't managed to find anything better
| since. I know of one local radio station and recording studio
| who successfully use it for remote work now.
|
| To get the best experience, disable all audio processing in the
| preferences, on the sound system pane, so duplex mode,
| automatic gain control and noise reduction should be off. If
| you're on Windows, use Windows Audio Session as the backend for
| lowest latency.
|
| Then, connect to a server, I use the German one for public
| stuff, as I'm close to it geographically and you don't need to
| register for it, but use whichever you want. After connecting,
| create a channel with application set to music, bitrate set to
| 150000 and channels set to stereo. Those are, at least, the
| parameters I use, and they work great. You can adjust the rest
| as you see fit.
|
| There are some video and screensharing capabilities as far as I
| know, but I haven't used them. Audio is definitely the primary
| focus. If you need any assistance, my username here at gmail
| dot com is the way to go.
|
| [1] bearware.dk for desktop, App Store and Google Play for iOS
| and Android.
|
| ps. I'm not affiliated with the company in any way, it's just a
| tool I use daily and would recommend to anyone who knows his
| way around the computer. It definitely doesn't pass the grandma
| test, though.
| padenot wrote:
| This audio processing is trivially deactivable by the websites
| themselves. Instead of doing:
|
| > navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({audio: true}).then(...)
|
| to get a stream of the input device, one can do:
|
| > navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({audio: {
| autoGainControl: false, noiseSuppression: false,
| echoCancellation: false }}).then(...)
|
| similarly, an _existing_ input audio stream can have its
| settings changed while it's running like so:
|
| > stream.applyConstraints({ autoGainControl: true,
| noiseSuppression: true, echoCancellation: true })
|
| this for examples re-enables the processing that we put on
| voice by default.
|
| This probably works everywhere, we've written a blog post about
| this that explain a few more things:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/fiddle-of-the-week-audio-
| con....
|
| If the website doesn't want to offer a control to switch this
| on/off, I'm confident this can be done by a browser extension
| in no time (which would have the benefit to work for all
| websites).
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| padenot, although I am a programmer of sorts, I don't do web
| development, so I'm at a loss. Say I go to the jitsi website
| (https://meet.jit.si/), type in my four word passcode, and
| get a conference connection with my teacher. When you say,
| "instead of doing..." doesn't apply to me, because I don't do
| anything. It sounds like what you are describing is what the
| developer of that web page needs to do, but me, as a user,
| doesn't see any of that.
| padenot wrote:
| Yes this is what I meant when I said "by the websites
| themselves".
| ce4 wrote:
| They also ask for translations at the bottom of the release
| notes. It's a bit unusual though that most of the time the
| translation project on weblate is locked, but i haven't seen any
| vandalism
| orthecreedence wrote:
| When I first saw Jitsi a few days ago, I thought "there's an
| open-source, p2p, e2e encrypted video chat already? Why did Riot
| build their own?"
|
| The next day I figured out that Riot's in-app video chat IS
| Jitsi. The world made sense again.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Sandstorm.io community members host weekly meetings on Jitsi and
| have for a few months. It's not perfect, but it works and it's
| open source, and that's great. I will say the audio on a computer
| is a bit hit and miss, I often opt to dial in with my phone
| instead, which works pretty solidly.
|
| A really nice perk is that you can have your room name URL, and
| the dial in number is the same for that URL, so if you reuse the
| same "room", you can just know the meeting ID and all, which I
| haven't really seen from other solutions.
| jxcl wrote:
| I read somewhere that they were working on better Firefox
| support. Is there any associated timeline with that?
| xd1936 wrote:
| https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Much of the hold up is Firefox's lack of simulcast support.
|
| There are a few tracking tickets in Bugzilla for that effort.
| bArray wrote:
| I've trialed several video conferencing apps in the last few
| weeks (Skype, Zoom, Hangouts and others), Jitsi Meet is the only
| one I've been able to have a video call on with my low-bandwidth,
| high-ping network. They've done a superb job for my use-case, I'm
| very happy with the result.
| 293984j29384 wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how complicated it is to add
| authentication to Jitsi meet. I ended up following a guide I
| found on their website it wasn't trivial.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| i just hope WebRTC Insertable Streams spec matures 10x faster now
| - https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552 . True
| end-to-end video conferencin privacy through the browser!
|
| This is the time when its truly needed. Firefox, Chrome and Edge
| should just sit in a room and not come out till its done.
| telesilla wrote:
| >Firefox, Chrome and Edge
|
| Edge is now Chromium, you need to invite Safari.
| kodablah wrote:
| I see nothing in the specification that specifically mentions
| encryption. Are there any concerns about performance of in-JS
| streaming encryption? Does the encoder/decoder take promises
| and are they expected to use the subtle crypto APIs in the
| browser which return promises?
| capableweb wrote:
| No, because the specification is more general than that. The
| specification is about being able to add a input/output
| transform step, so you can add encryption on top of WebRTC
| streams, via this new API.
|
| JavaScript encryption/decryption seems to work fine for the
| most basic use cases, but if you have many streams you need
| to do encryption/decryption for you, you probably want to use
| native browser APIs for it or WebAssembly.
| kodablah wrote:
| Right, I understand it's more general, but there is a use
| cases section in the explainer that putting this there
| might have value.
|
| In other cases where encryption is used (e.g. fetch, webrtc
| itself, etc), often we ask the browser to do it due to,
| among other things, the performance benefit of not doing it
| in JS or WASM. I'd have to test using
| window.crypto.subtle.encrypt or tweetnacl something to
| check the overhead (I do see the webcodec examples show a
| write/readable stream which allows promise-based
| encryption). Arguably this could have been done at the conn
| level w/ raw RTC data instead of the media stream level so
| I wouldn't have to handle data channels separately, but I
| see the value in sharing with other use cases of client-
| side stream manip.
| bilal4hmed wrote:
| also Safari
| capableweb wrote:
| Apple has proven with previous actions and non-investments in
| the web platform that they are not interested in contributing
| to something like that and would rather focus on their own
| proprietary services/applications. Right now, they seem to be
| doing the bare minimum to not receive too much criticism from
| developers who are stuck on Apple devices.
| maxwell wrote:
| Hence the antitrust investigation.
|
| https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHR
| G...
| capableweb wrote:
| I hadn't seen that before, thanks for sharing. First
| question: "Does Apple permit iPhone users to uninstall
| Safari? If yes, please describe the steps a user would
| need to take in order to do so. If no, please explain why
| not"
|
| Apple answers that users cannot, and adds:
|
| "The App Store provides Apple's users with access to
| third party apps, including web browsers. Browsers such
| as Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and others are
| available for users to download"
|
| While forgetting to mention that all "Apple's policies
| require all iOS apps that browse the web to use the iOS
| built-in iOS WebKit-based rendering framework and WebKit
| JavaScript" [https://developer.apple.com/app-
| store/review/guidelines/], effectively meaning it's just
| a skin on top of WebKit, which is controlled by Apple.
|
| I wish something good comes out of that investigation,
| but realistically, I don't see it happening.
| maxwell wrote:
| Seems like a straightforward retread of _U.S. v.
| Microsoft_.
|
| 1. Can you delete Safari on iOS?
|
| No, but the "App Store provides Apple's users with access
| to third party apps, including web browsers."
|
| 2. Can you set a third-party browser as the default
| browser?
|
| No.
|
| 3. How about for opening links in bundled apps?
|
| No, see questions 1 and 2.
|
| 4. Okay, so can these third-party browsers include their
| own rendering engine?
|
| No, because "Apple can provide security updates to all
| our users quickly and accurately, no matter which browser
| they decide to download from the App Store."
|
| 5. What if a third-party browser introduced _better_
| security /privacy features?
|
| See question 4 and it's "not our experience that
| competing web browsers have typically offered enhanced
| privacy or security that would protect users as
| adequately as our WebKit protections."
|
| 6. What features does Apple cut off to third-party
| browsers? * WebRTC * Service
| Workers * Intelligent Tracking Protection *
| Fullscreen API
| saagarjha wrote:
| You may be interested in the comments from when this was
| first posted here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21587191
| reader_1000 wrote:
| When I tried Jitsi with my family friends, some of them struggled
| to use it since they don't know English. So I think changing the
| language can be easier for nonspeakers of English.
|
| For example, language select box can be placed next to "Go"
| button (when creating meeting) and next to info button in the
| meeting. Also using "Accept-Language" HTTP header for choosing
| the language can be a good default. Another option is to add a
| language query parameter to the URL so that host can easily share
| meeting with a particular language.
|
| Also if it would be great if some improvements can be made for
| low bandwitdh since there are people with slow connections and
| limited data plans. (On the other hand, there is already an
| option to lower video quality).
|
| Other than that, kudos to Jitsi team for their great efforts and
| this great project.
| ehsankia wrote:
| The very last item in the blog post says
|
| > Updated translations
|
| So it seems like they've been working on this.
| reader_1000 wrote:
| I think that work is for improving quality and quantity of
| translations which is also good.
| nhumrich wrote:
| I want to like jitsi, but have yet to use it without participants
| in the meeting having issues. It doesn't remember hardware
| selection, so if the default hardware is incorrect, you have to
| change it every time. Often people arent able to see video, or
| hear audio. If people aren't using headsets, then the audio from
| their speaker loops and causes feedback. Its always been painful
| for everyone. But everyone else seems to love it, so what am I
| doing wrong? (Running in gcp, fwiw)
| thomcrowe wrote:
| I moved to Jitsi a few weeks ago and have been really pleased.
| Getting people not used to video conferencing on an in-browser
| call is much simpler
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Seems a decent bunch of improvements; sharing system audio is
| apparently a useful feature (I don't care, but I see it mentioned
| enough), and device and muting changes are nice usability
| improvements.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Agreed. Glad they're adding things at this kind of reasonable
| pace.
|
| In the linux philosophy there are other things that can do the
| audio sharing (like Pulseaudio loopback modules) but I guess no
| one should have to learn those in order to use the simple
| feature in this tool.
| rjsw wrote:
| Or just add audio and video sharing to systemd. /s
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It's also a cross-platform tool, so it _might_ make sense to
| do their own thing that works everywhere.
| maxired wrote:
| I am actually working on a Jitsi meet fork dedicated to agile
| Team https://meet.retrolution.co/
|
| So far I added features such as Poker planning and post is
| drawing. Any feedback welcome ;-)
| nfc wrote:
| Hi, I think there could be some synergies between what I'm
| working on and what you are doing. Couldn't find a way to
| contact you other than Twitter or LinkedIn, if you want to have
| a talk my email is in my profile :)
| maxired wrote:
| done ;-)
| baco wrote:
| Where is the source code available?
| 1over137 wrote:
| Why fork? Did they not want your patches?
| maxired wrote:
| Good question ;-). I actually did not asked, coz I want for
| now to have the freedom to experiment and break things.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I had a look at contributing to jitsi, starting with translations
| for their mobile app, but the CLA turned me away. I really
| dislike those things.
|
| However, I like the product they are building. Keep it up! I hope
| the firefox issues will soon be a thing of the past
| (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...)
| spsphulse wrote:
| I've been using Jitsi for a couple of weeks and my experience has
| been pretty good so far.
|
| Got a quick question if someone can answer. Is is some how
| possible to use OBS stream with Jitsi? For my use case, I work
| with an one MS-Excel window capture & my webcam input capture in
| the corner, to explain some concepts to my students.
|
| Any help appreciated.
| seedie wrote:
| For Linux and Windows yes. There are plugins that can create a
| virtual cam https://github.com/obsproject/obs-
| studio/issues/2568#issueco...
| saghul wrote:
| It should work fine, since it would create a virtual webcam.
| Please drop by https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5425
| if you run into issues.
| k__ wrote:
| I used the hosted Jitsi Meet service. Worked really well. It was
| just sad that they favored Chrome over Firefox.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I hope this crisis causes Jitsi to get some serious funding. I've
| been trying Jitsi on and off for about 6 years and it's never
| been this good. It also could be a lot better.
| brightball wrote:
| Me too. I'm really loving everything that I see from the
| project
| troyvit wrote:
| I tried to find a place to contribute on their site but it
| seems they are fully funded by 8 & 8.
| alharith wrote:
| Just to offer a counter point: this crisis feels mostly
| manufactured. Zoom is under a microscope that almost all other
| comm software would fail just as horribly, if not worse. Maybe
| the majority of users here were too young to remember, but
| Skype was far, far worse, and did not have same positive
| response and seriousness Zoom seems to be having. That said,
| competition and alternatives is good!
| windexh8er wrote:
| I disagree that this feels manufactured. It's due to a
| catalyst - one that has brought on a lot of positive _and_
| negative attention to Zoom. The evidence is all there and it
| is factual. Zoom has misrepresented their encryption on both
| the implementation and operational sides. However to say that
| only the bad press Zoom has received is "manufactured" is a
| misrepresentation.
|
| I'm not sure I follow the Skype comparison. If you're talking
| about Skype historically (and it seems you are) - then that
| was before a lot of the strong privacy and encryption
| conversations were being had in the larger audience of
| consumers. Setting this comparison is a slippery slope. Yes,
| we know Skype was used and abused by nation state actors -
| but for the time encryption was not the norm. Things have
| changed and today misrepresenting encryption and privacy is a
| much more grave sin that consumers are more concerned about.
| Businesses lying or misrepresenting it should have been held
| accountable back then - but they only finally are now.
| holler wrote:
| > Things have changed and today misrepresenting encryption
| and privacy is a much more grave sin that consumers are
| more concerned about.
|
| Not disagreeing but I think we have to remember that 99% of
| consumers are _not_ HN tech gurus and really don't care.
| They only care about the quality of the product
| /experience, and clearly Zoom has topped the market on
| those (similar to slack for enterprise chat).
| tareqak wrote:
| If all other communication software will fail just as
| horribly under the same scrutiny, then it's fine. With the
| quarantine, we definitely have the time to make something
| better.
| kardos wrote:
| Expectations for security/privacy are higher now than in
| years past, Zoom is being evaluated with a 2020 lens.
| simias wrote:
| I assumed the parent was talking about the COVID-19 crisis.
| Or is there a Zoom-related crisis I missed?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Skype used to be flawless until Microsoft decided to get rid
| of the P2P model and replace beautiful native clients with an
| Electron pile of crap.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Yeah no. Skype was certainly good at the time, but compared
| to discord, slack, hangouts, or pretty much any
| contemporary chat app/suite, it didn't stand up.
|
| Also as another user mentioned, skype was a DOS vector for
| individual users.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I don't have any issues with Skype and it's my #1 choice
| when videocalling my friends all over the world. What
| exactly are the issues with Skype?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Not sure it was quite flawless, but it has gone from being
| my first-choice platform to last place. I fear that
| LinkedIn is going down a similar path, post-acquisition.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path,
| post-acquisition.
|
| While I'm sure it could be made worse, I didn't exactly
| hear anything good about LinkedIn pre-aquisition, either.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Fair point. The most noticeable difference so far has
| been the hardening of the login wall.
| CrankyBear wrote:
| I remember that version of Skype and flawless wasn't the
| word I'd use for it. Buggy and insecure as hell are what
| come to my mind.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm curious about the "insecure" part of it? I haven't
| heard of any large-scale security incident about it.
| nonesuchluck wrote:
| A number of Internet personalities such as Twitch
| streamers were doxxed with a little help from Skype IPs.
| Maybe impossible to avoid without centralized hubs or an
| overlay network like Tor.
|
| It is curious how Skype was started by Kazaa engineers
| basically to find a legit use for their p2p streaming
| tech, and now it's not even p2p anymore.
| notechback wrote:
| But Skype was actually an encrypted communication channel
| until Microsoft bought it and removed server-side encryption
| SamWhited wrote:
| > Just to offer a counter point: this crisis feels mostly
| manufactured. Zoom is under a microscope that almost all
| other comm software would fail just as horribly, if not worse
|
| I fail to see why this matters; let's assume this is true and
| everything else is just as bad (and a lot of stuff _is_ just
| as bad, so this may be a fair assumption): the answer is that
| they should be put under the microscope too and forced to
| clean up their act and stop lying to users or putting them at
| risk unnecessarily with bad development processes. The answer
| is not to just say "meh, everyone else is just as bad" and
| keep using Zoom.
| dmix wrote:
| Signal went under a microscope during a critical time
| (Snowden leaks) and not only succeeded but changed how
| everyone else was doing it or at least set a new bar. Which
| then proceeded to help hundreds of millions of people as apps
| like WhatsApp adopted their crypto.
| holler wrote:
| yeah but how many non-tech minded people use or have heard
| of signal vs those who have used or heard of a zoom
| meeting?
| dmix wrote:
| If major plays like WhtatsApp being capable of figuring
| it out and adopting it with hundreds of millions of
| users, then I fully believe any-sized company can where
| it won't kill their business model.
|
| It doesn't need to be a part of Zoom's business model to
| watch everything so there's no excuse not to. And after
| that people will stop bringing this up every time their
| brand is named.
| bisby wrote:
| I agree. I've been just waiting for a use case for jitsi (the
| woes of social tools, is there is no use if there is no remote
| party willing) for years. I love when open source options are
| valid options.
|
| After all the zoom privacy/security nightmare stuff, we've
| started looking at alternatives, but we have a set of features
| we need that either aren't in Jitsi or we couldn't figure them
| out. So in the mean time we've been stuck with zoom.
|
| * breakout rooms * annotations on screenshare (being able to
| draw on the presenter's screen) * something other than dropbox
| for exporting recordings
|
| There may be other shortcomings, but we'd be willing to
| "downgrade" except for these that leave management going "well,
| i guess we'll just deal with the security issues of zoom rather
| than lose features"
| guerby wrote:
| https://bigbluebutton.org/
|
| is free software, has breakout rooms, collaborative drawing
| on slides, synchronized playing of youtube and a few other
| features.
|
| Works quite well in my experience.
| dvduval wrote:
| What is the approximate bandwidth cost per user per hour?
| saghul wrote:
| Jitsi will use up to 2.5Mbps for the user "on stage" (the large
| view) and about 200Kbps for each thumbnail.
|
| You can use these numbers and your usual conference size to
| calculate how much data you'd use and then calculate the cost
| of that.
| maelito wrote:
| Probably depends on your connection
| dvduval wrote:
| Isn't there a cost for bandwidth for the server where you
| have it installed?
| mlinksva wrote:
| I wonder if there is anything published about meet.jit.si's
| use, traffic and costs (as well as scaling issues, solutions)?
| I imagine that it all of these have increased a lot over the
| last weeks, and it's pretty impressive that the entirely free
| and non-monetized (AFAICT) service has remained up and without
| problems (AFAIK).
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| This depends entirely on the quality of the video sent.
| ejo4041 wrote:
| Does anyone know how their releases correspond to version
| numbers? It looks like they are possibly releasing multiple times
| a day, or maybe using releases and tags in a non-standard way.
| https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases
| ejo4041 wrote:
| I guess I see the release number appended to the end in these:
| https://download.jitsi.org/jitsi/windows/
| intsunny wrote:
| I wish jitsi supported mobile browsers. People get really turned
| off at having to install yet another video conferencing app
| (YAVCA).
| smichel17 wrote:
| If you enable desktop mode, it'll with (in mobile Firefox, at
| least).
|
| ...but not well. I can see why they disable it by default, even
| if I wish they included a button to proceed anyway.
| huskyr wrote:
| I'm impressed with Jitsi, it all works pretty well. The only
| thing i noticed, compared to some of the proprietary solutions,
| is that my laptop got pretty hot because of CPU usage. I wonder
| if they're doing anything about that for the next release.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Which ones don't? I get the same behavior from Slack, Lifesize,
| Hangouts Meet, and Zoom.
| fsh wrote:
| Jitsi simply forwards the video streams between users, whereas
| some proprietary services seem to re-encode everything into a
| single stream. So in a large conference each client might have
| to deal with decoding dozens of high-resolution streams. This
| is probably very difficult to solve without reducing video
| quality.
| evolvedlight wrote:
| I started using this (for https://virtualcoffeebreak.app) but in
| the end had to switch to daily.co - the jitsi support for mobile
| devices is a bit painful and doesn't work so well. The mobile
| iframe is quite jarring and doesn't provide that nice user
| experience; for example it doesn't detect if the app is already
| installed or not.
|
| Having to download an app increases the barrier compared to other
| solutions.
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