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BigBlueButton: An open source web conferencing system

127 points| angristan | 6 years ago |github.com | reply

31 comments

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[+] Faaak|6 years ago|reply
We use this product on our company of ~150 during the COVID work-at-home thingy.

It's quite great ! It supports audio and video and is quite reactive for us.

[+] mkl|6 years ago|reply
Cool. I have a few questions:

How many people can you have in sessions simultaneously?

Do you use the shared whiteboard? What's it like for people without a stylus?

Any idea why it requires such an ancient version of Ubuntu (16.04)?

[+] weitzj|6 years ago|reply
Do you have some numbers what capacity one needs for this many people? Is it webrtc? Can you have more than 10 in a video call?
[+] v0tary|6 years ago|reply
Several schools in the US are using this for online classes in the face of COVID-19.
[+] codefined|6 years ago|reply
How does this compare to something like 'Jitsi Meet'?
[+] giomasce|6 years ago|reply
It is more oriented to teaching, so it's more classroom style: there is a main presenter and many listeners, it had a whiteboard, things like these. It's quite feature-packed, while Jitsi is maybe more minimal.
[+] f00_|6 years ago|reply
Best open-source, self-hosted solution to this problem. There is a mattermost plugin.

Very easy install, requires a 10 - 15$ vps instance.

Would like to see if anyone uses this on a large scale

[+] jdc|6 years ago|reply
Looks like they recommend 500gb storage space for production.. where are running yours?
[+] wolrah|6 years ago|reply
This seems interesting, but the fact that the officially supported distro is still Ubuntu 16.04 is alarming. There is no good excuse for actively developed software to require an outdated operating system.

I get that it's a LTS platform, but so is 18.04. 16.04 only has ~1 year of support left, so deploying infrastructure on it now is idiotic.

At this point they should at least be recommending 18.04 and should be testing on betas of 20.04 while considering compatibility issues to be high priority.

[+] capableweb|6 years ago|reply
Seems like a set of ~8 or something core contributors working on this open source project. You talk about it like it's a professional product. Ubuntu 16.04 is still everywhere and I'm sure they have their reasons for not having time to deploy on multiple platforms / architectures / beta lines in order to test changes.

I think you best shot at fixing this problem that has "no good excuse" and using it would be "idiotic" would be to contribute yourself. The least you can do is open a thoughtful issue asking the same things you asked here, but in a way better tone. Even better would be to contribute code but eh, Java.

Edit: another comment in this thread: "That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533

[+] kbutler|6 years ago|reply
> "alarming...no good excuse...idiotic"

You don't have to use it, but your criticism is excessive. As a casual bystander providing nothing but commentary, you really don't get to choose the priorities and schedule of an open source project.

They provide software that runs on currently supported platforms, and they are working on 18.04 support - sounds like it is the focus current development effort for the next release: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bigbluebutton-dev/qWjV2zoc4h...

[+] nickthegreek|6 years ago|reply
Its been awhile since I used BBB, but I found issues with it when there were over ~20 participants. Anyone know how well BBB scales these days?
[+] jtbayly|6 years ago|reply
Well... the website won't load for me right now, so it's not promising. :|
[+] lxe|6 years ago|reply
Just tried their demo -- looks full-featured and solid overall! Setup documentation seems pretty detailed.
[+] giomasce|6 years ago|reply
That's right. Although I tried to setup self hosted both BBB and Jitsi Meet, and was not rally satisfied. Both had quite some problems with audio and video streams, which either didn't start or froze later. I think that both software are better than I could setup, because I've seen them working pretty good, but I'm not sure what is the secret ingredient.