Does anyone have other suggestions? Either for other services or for troubleshooting Jitsi?
Whereby is, as far as I can tell, completely owned by a Norwegian registered company.
You can turn on "mobile mode" in advanced device settings, and it should be a bit better. But we're a bit limited in how CPU-friendly we really can be, living in the browser. Not that we can't improve, there's certainly extra tricks we could try - but not easily without also lowering fps and resolution.
I don't think "low resource use" is a big selling-argument for our product. Video can be quite heavy.
Just some feedback. I think the free tier was a little unclear.
> Free
> Personal use
> 1 user
> 1 meeting room
I have trouble reading this. It's as if I coule only create one room for myself without having anybody to chat with.
A p2p room can have 4 total people in it. So say you plus 3 concurrent guests, none of those guests need any account or "user".
Indeed even you don't have to log in after you've created the room if you leave it unlocked. :)
This "more than 4 room" is not p2p and end-to-end encrypted, since the server (SFU) needs to read and change some headers. So it is a tradeoff. There's now "insertable streams" which allow you to do encryption on the media client side, but it's a test for now: https://webrtchacks.com/true-end-to-end-encryption-with-webr...
However, I should mention that it's not possible to join calls through the mobile app (as far as I can tell), and the web app on mobile wouldn't capture my Bluetooth headset's audio properly somehow.
Again, thanks for the great work. Just thought I'd let you know :)
I was working on fixing up that when COVID-19 hit. Now we're trying to stamp out more obscure audio+video bugs (like bluetooth, which can be unreliable). We're in process of hiring a few more people so we can hopefully put someone on caring more for the non-logged in mobile app experience.
You do get a join button once you've logged in. But I must confess it is not a good experience by default. It used to be on the top of the priority list, but then scaling and any video/audio issues jumped to the top.
There is currently a bug with audio, where it'll crash in Safari, -- and we have had some issues reconnects that was more our fault (though Firefox and Chrome is much more forgiving). We have a workaround for the first, and will be doing a fix for the second once we're reasonably sure it won't regress other browsers.
Is it any of those issues you talk about? Or is it something else? (I'm not personally familiar with the Safari issues, btw, since I'm a Linux user, but I keep an eye on Firefox and Chromium-based browsers)
I will play with it today and send bug report. Might help you guys out, I really like it otherwise
Are there settings you adjusted?
Are you just doing one-on-one meetings (that works fine for me too) or group calls of 3+ (which is what I need to do everyday where it immediately becomes unusable)?
I'm also using a linux distro based off ubuntu/debian.
I am using Jitsi in//on the browser [for me, Firefox].
I don't know if I have a preference as I have only "just started using" the past few months via being given a link I click on whilst I am on my laptop... so unfortunately I cannot speak about Jitsi via Desktop Version at this time.
> Are there settings you adjusted?
Besides simple sound volume off of my OS//headphones, I use whatever the default settings are.
> 1-1 meetings or 3+ group calls?
Group calls, each time would be roughly 5-12 people.
For other info just for giggles:
The laptop I do this on is connected wirelessly to my home wireless network, about 6 feet away from my wireless router; my wireless router may have multiple people using it at a given time since I share. I'm in US-California-Silicon_Valley on Comcast.
Full disclosure: I am doing an internship at Amazon, but my experience predates me working there.
We have also used GoToMeeting with a good amount of success. Anything but Teams, haha.
My D&D group switched from Zoom to Skype and the performance/quality is noticeably better. There's 5 of us and it's great. Free, no time limits, etc.
I have to say the video quality is much better and the DM being able to screen share while we can still see each other is great. Also the "Brady Bunch" view is great, being able to see everyone at once is awesome.
I'm not very happy with all of the news trickling out about Zoom but I really do like their product.
That's my position, too. I teach at a large public university in Japan, where the school year begins in April. At the beginning of March, we were expecting to start classes in person as normal a month later. By around March 20, we had decided to teach most of our classes online; a week later, "most" had become "all." Teachers and students had little to no prior experience with online education, and their level of general digital literacy varied widely. From the plethora of tools available, we had to choose software that everyone could use and that would be reliable and scalable.
Despite concerns about security issues, Zoom was chosen as our videoconferencing platform. That seems to have turned out to be a good choice, as it is stable, can handle large groups, and offers features (breakout rooms, video and audio recording, attendance reports, etc.) that are useful for university classes. That fact that it hasn't (yet) been blocked in China was also a factor in choosing it, as we have students stuck overseas who need to take part in classes. Anecdotal reports from colleagues who teach at other universities in Japan suggest that the non-Zoom platforms have not performed as well.
Now that teachers and students are used to online classes, I hope we can also try other tools in the future. But considering how well Zoom performed during our hectic ramp-up to online teaching, I give it my grudging support for the time being.
[1] https://peercalls.com/ [2] https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/moonlite
Does only Chrome work? Seems to defeat the point of FOSS...
It may be resolved now: the bugzilla entry mentions a patch: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1606823
Until then, Jitsi is "good enough", even if it's still pretty rough in certain parts.
Uhh that's a strong stand for something you don't know...especially the 'never' part of it.
Have you tried Jitsi?
It's really great as a face-to-face solution though, where Zoom and many others are actually kind of overkill.
I would love to know about any Zoom competitors, free or paid, with comparable quality.
W.r.t. the general meme about WebRTC, this is old (2018) and explicitly does not claim to be anything other than suggestive: https://jitsi.org/blog/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/
That's the fix I needed, cheers! For some reason it doesn't impact the Google Meet quality for me but now Jitsi looks great.
BigBlueButton is also interesting, but it's more like a Schooling-tool...but also without a client (aka just need a browser)
There's Jitsi Meet, Jitsi Desktop, there's a browser extension, a server-which-isn't-just-a-server etc. It's a bit confusing.
Just to answer this—technically yes, but they use dark patterns to dissuade people from learning about it.
One could say the same of Zoom...
There's Zoom Meetings Client, Zoom Rooms, a desktop app, mobile app, Outlook Plug-in, Browser extension, etc.
Do you love the company, its leadership, its product, or its pricing?
you didn't ask me, but imo they haven't existed long enough to garnish love for their company and leadership.
They had a product and a price point at a time with huge & abnormal sudden demand. I think this alone was enough to make them successful in the short term.
But that's an integral part of the product. There is a lot of reason for suspicion floating around the company and the product itself, and the long string of security screwups and misdirection confirms every bit of that.
What's the point of having even good functionality if it comes attached to such concerns? Most products have a good side but choosing one is always about picking what's the worst problem that you can live with rather than the best feature.
Subtle yet severe privacy invasions do not matter to the glaring majority of people because they cannot associate it with direct consequences.
If I have been using Zoom and the Chinese government now has 200 hours of my facial and speech data, at first it doesn't impact me. I don't see the impact, I don't feel it aside from some people yelling on HN.
The consequences are either subtle and easily dismissed (e.g. ad tech/marketing when Instagram secretly listens to the phone mic and suddenly you see products that were part of the conversation) or severe and too far out to relate it to a Zoom call 23 months ago (e.g. border control when entering China for tourism).
If you're not an activist then chances are you do not care about online privacy.
We are constantly bombarded with new concerns and this particular topic requires expert opinion to truly know which software you can trust. Then there is the problem of choosing which expert to trust. And you still have to have time left simply to live your life. It's just not an easy thing to let yourself be concerned with this.
In my personal experience, I've yet to meet a person that turned out not to care once I've taken the time to discuss this with them one on one.
However, without some sort of reversal, this is enough for me to deal with the mess of doing that.