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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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.
I've been using Jitsi for a while, even though my company uses GSuite. Not going into details about the corporate use since many have already, but the other day it was my daughter's birthday, being on a quarantine and all and having family in different countries, I sent a jisi link to the family groups on whatsapp so we could all sing happy birthday together, everybody got in, it went all very smoothly. Better than the usual business meeting "can you hear me, I hear you, hello" routine. Thank you Jitsi team!
Linux HNers, is there any video-conferencing software that is hardware-accelerated for us Linux users?
Everything I tried (Jitsi on Firefox or Chrome, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Zoom, Slack) consumes a full CPU all of the time (a.k.a. all no hardware acceleration), making fans spin and slowing down other work.
Advice? I'm using Arch Linux & Xorg on a recent Thinkpad with Intel CPU & GPU, and the packages mentioned by the Intel section of https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera... (intel-media-driver, libva-intel-driver, linux-firmware) are installed.
I'm the creator of a remote-first community/open source project called CodeBuddies (a not-for-profit), and we built Jitsi into our hangouts (meetings anyone can schedule to pair program or study together) -- i.e. whenever someone schedules a hangout to meet with someone else in the community, we embed Jitsi as an iframe onto the event page.
We initially used Google Hangouts for the project in 2014, and we've been using Jitsi ever since Google Hangouts deprecated its API in 2017.
I generally love Jitsi; like Google Hangouts, it allows multiple people to screenshare simultaneously in our virtual coworking sessions. However, I have stumbled upon a couple of issues with it:
- higher rates of audio or screensharing issues, especially when the participants are long distance or if one of them has a poor wifi connection, or is on an older computer.
- screensharing with the browser extension sometimes doesn't work, or times out
We're actually rebuilding the CodeBuddies platform right now, and for the next iteration I am strongly considering paying for the Zoom API instead because it's more accessible to people with lower quality wifi connections and for folks on older machines.
An interesting anecdote: they're installing Jitsi Meet in all Catalan prisons as we speak, as the go-to option now that visitors are no longer allowed, installed on the existing computers (i.e. prison libraries).
They're planning to have Whatsapp setup too as a secondary option, because it's the option with widest reach, but that requires buying a bunch of new mobile phones.
An interesting related question would be what software are the different national cabinets, states presidencies and other high ranking officials etc using in their daily conferences.
We have a lot of experience working with Jitsi Meet, if anyone has questions integrating Jitsi, free to send me an email [email protected]. Happy to help!
I think it shows the sheer incompetence of Google product management that they managed to lose the strong hold Gtalk had. Gtalk worked. People liked it. Hangouts too worked well. I used hangouts in browser in 2013 and it worked very well.
Somehow google decided to replace hangouts with allo and duo, and then deprecated allo, and moved to RCS. I never understand how such decisions get made. Do they think customers have infinite loyalty and will move to any new product launched by the company. A lot of people I know used hangouts. Very few use Duo.
No compelling revenue stream, to a company the size of Google. Probably seen as a fun project that got boring once the hard work (of fixing bugs) started.
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.
We switched from Slack to Mattermost internally, and while setting it up I noticed Jitsi integration offered. I've been really impressed by it, and we're working to move most meetings to it. Some teams are still using Zoom, but I don't think that's going to last very long!
My Brazilian Jiujitsu academy is trying it out, too, for virtual classes during shutdown. We just held the first today, and a bunch of non-technical parents were able to get things set up for their kids so that we could all attend a class together. It worked quite well. Given the price, it's a really impressive piece of software.
Also easy to skin and deploy - we setup a custom branded instance for our customers to use during the pandemic within a couple of days:
https://meet.brring.com/
It’s rather incredible what it can do:
* SIP gateway to support inbound telephony dial in
* Meeting recording
* Auto scaling of the video bridges to dynamically handle load
* Native iOS, Android and even Apple Watch clients
We now use it for most meetings, works very well so far, several sessions in parallel with several dozen people at the same time (but mostly only using audio).
Screen sharing works fine as well.
We made the experience that they are unfortunately right about requiring chrome (chromium works fine as well).
Would be great if firefox support could come back.
If I can offer some UX feedback, the golden rule of all UX design is to eliminate question marks.
The typing animation in the placeholder draws all my attention. Puzzled, I tried to make sense of ForwardShelvesCollapseClose for several seconds, when I should have been reading the landing page copy.
The principle to design by omission is to ask if an element answers the question you want me to ask, or raises the question you want me to ask, e.g.
1. "How much does it cost?"
2. "Where do I buy it?"
3. "How do I share it?"
Whilst its great that people are iterating on existing products out there, I feel slightly sad that we just have a load of "alternatives" that don't play nicely with each other.
It would be much nicer if I could use FaceTime, whilst speaking to someone on Hangouts, plus someone else on Jitsi. Apart from discovery, what is stopping that? I'm assuming they all use basically the same underlying codecs, of course!
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?
[+] [-] ISO-morphism|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ElijahLynn|6 years ago|reply
I shall suggest Jitsi Meet again soon ;).
[+] [-] judge2020|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marnett|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] monkeywork|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|6 years ago|reply
... but why? Is it just a familiarity thing?
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HumblyTossed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MR4D|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawabawa3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hannob|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cheald|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surround|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/214629443-Zoom-Web...
[+] [-] fergbrain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leshenka|6 years ago|reply
p.s. Discord has no problems with my audio
[+] [-] rock_artist|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] undefined-1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dserodio|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ironmagma|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|6 years ago|reply
...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?
[+] [-] ricardobeat|6 years ago|reply
Jitsi itself barely works on Firefox and not at all on mobile devices (without their app).
[+] [-] Johnyma22|6 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] leonroy|6 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] qpiox|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hanniabu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenc|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|6 years ago|reply
On top of that it's open source and end to end encrypted.
Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a happy user.
[+] [-] surround|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] P4u1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronjouch|6 years ago|reply
Everything I tried (Jitsi on Firefox or Chrome, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Zoom, Slack) consumes a full CPU all of the time (a.k.a. all no hardware acceleration), making fans spin and slowing down other work.
Advice? I'm using Arch Linux & Xorg on a recent Thinkpad with Intel CPU & GPU, and the packages mentioned by the Intel section of https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera... (intel-media-driver, libva-intel-driver, linux-firmware) are installed.
[+] [-] lpnotes|6 years ago|reply
We initially used Google Hangouts for the project in 2014, and we've been using Jitsi ever since Google Hangouts deprecated its API in 2017.
I generally love Jitsi; like Google Hangouts, it allows multiple people to screenshare simultaneously in our virtual coworking sessions. However, I have stumbled upon a couple of issues with it: - higher rates of audio or screensharing issues, especially when the participants are long distance or if one of them has a poor wifi connection, or is on an older computer. - screensharing with the browser extension sometimes doesn't work, or times out
We're actually rebuilding the CodeBuddies platform right now, and for the next iteration I am strongly considering paying for the Zoom API instead because it's more accessible to people with lower quality wifi connections and for folks on older machines.
[+] [-] opan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pimterry|6 years ago|reply
They're planning to have Whatsapp setup too as a secondary option, because it's the option with widest reach, but that requires buying a bunch of new mobile phones.
More details (in Spanish): https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/2020-03-24/videollamadas...
[+] [-] severine|6 years ago|reply
An interesting related question would be what software are the different national cabinets, states presidencies and other high ranking officials etc using in their daily conferences.
[+] [-] johnxie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionisloire|6 years ago|reply
You can give our app a try at https://www.taskade.com/new (no registration needed, mobile and desktop)
Open to any feedback!
[+] [-] enitihas|6 years ago|reply
Somehow google decided to replace hangouts with allo and duo, and then deprecated allo, and moved to RCS. I never understand how such decisions get made. Do they think customers have infinite loyalty and will move to any new product launched by the company. A lot of people I know used hangouts. Very few use Duo.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiii1408|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cheald|6 years ago|reply
My Brazilian Jiujitsu academy is trying it out, too, for virtual classes during shutdown. We just held the first today, and a bunch of non-technical parents were able to get things set up for their kids so that we could all attend a class together. It worked quite well. Given the price, it's a really impressive piece of software.
[+] [-] leonroy|6 years ago|reply
It’s rather incredible what it can do:
* SIP gateway to support inbound telephony dial in
* Meeting recording
* Auto scaling of the video bridges to dynamically handle load
* Native iOS, Android and even Apple Watch clients
All free, all open source. The install videos are also really good indeed: https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/
[+] [-] maxnoe|6 years ago|reply
We now use it for most meetings, works very well so far, several sessions in parallel with several dozen people at the same time (but mostly only using audio).
Screen sharing works fine as well.
We made the experience that they are unfortunately right about requiring chrome (chromium works fine as well).
Would be great if firefox support could come back.
[+] [-] buovjaga|6 years ago|reply
More about the renovation effort: https://jitsi.org/news/jvb-2-0-preparing-our-video-router-fo...
[+] [-] pgt|6 years ago|reply
The typing animation in the placeholder draws all my attention. Puzzled, I tried to make sense of ForwardShelvesCollapseClose for several seconds, when I should have been reading the landing page copy.
The principle to design by omission is to ask if an element answers the question you want me to ask, or raises the question you want me to ask, e.g.
1. "How much does it cost?" 2. "Where do I buy it?" 3. "How do I share it?"
[+] [-] cjwebb|6 years ago|reply
It would be much nicer if I could use FaceTime, whilst speaking to someone on Hangouts, plus someone else on Jitsi. Apart from discovery, what is stopping that? I'm assuming they all use basically the same underlying codecs, of course!
[+] [-] justaj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|6 years ago|reply