[beanjammin]

Interesting, I haven't tried Jami. If I am understanding it correctly it seems to provide calling features, which Zoom and other typical video conferencing type applications don't.

I'll also through Jitsi out there as a very capable FLOSS alternative to Zoom. If you tried it a few years ago it's changed dramatically in the last while. It's now WebRTC based and runs in browser without any download. It's not quite end to end encryption because the stream needs to be decoded on the server before being re-encoded for the other clients, but since you can easily self host it on a cheap VM I find this acceptable.

[sk7]

Jitsi does not re-encode video streams on the server, it's a SFU (selective forwarding unit) and just forwards (some) video streams to the other participators. When Simulcast is enabled, multiple resolutions of your video are streamed to the Jitsi server and it only sends those streams to clients which they asked for (participants can choose the quality of video they receive, in the UI)

[divbzero]

Can’t WebRTC support peer-to-peer video calls without running the stream through a server? I have vague recollection that it can but am not particularly familiar with the protocol.

[divbzero]

To answer my own question: Yes, WebRTC supports peer-to-peer video calls but does require a “signaling server” to help establish and close the peer-to-peer connection. [1]

[1]: https://www.html5rocks.com/tutorials/webrtc/basics/ "Getting Started With WebRTC"

[tincholio]

It does, but when the number of users is >2, typically you will go through a TURN server.