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Comment by manyoso | Hacker News Reader

This is a great rant, but what are the best solutions to this today? Has someone, somewhere solved this or at least well on their way to a solution?

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Can't speak as to how it scales but I had to use both webex and Zoom in the past year. Paid corporate accounts etc.. No affiliation to either.

Webex linux support is unbelievably poor(literally, greater than a 1/2 days work to get it installed on linux). Sound quality deteriorates on international calls. Just really crappy experience overall.

Zoom has rpms/deb packages available. Installation- 30 secs.. Sound quality was crystal clear on international calls.

Webex is one of the few product offerings that makes me truly angry.

Last few months I have used Zoom, RingCentral, Skype for Business, Google Hangouts, and Gotomeeting.

Zoom was best followed by gotomeeting.

I really like https://appear.in - simple, straight-forward, and "just works". Don't know how well it works for more than two people, though. You can add screensharing with a Chrome plugin. It's all I need, really.

we use appear.in daily - it works well up to 5 people. It also has an interesting feature to allow you to "mute" certain participants, which works well in our use case where some participants can be in the same physical room. On "older" (say 2012 macbook pro), it easily pegs chrome at 100% CPU though

Paid Zoom works generally well, and much better on mobile than alternatives - you can also record meetings, and the recordings are of decent quality.

I'm another happy user of appear.in

There are still many improvements that are possible but at the moment, it's the best service I've used for video conferencing.

Agreed! We use Zoom almost exclusively at Elastic. Since we're a fully distributed company, we rely on video conferencing pretty heavily. Zoom handles everything from a handful of people up to full-company meetings. It's pretty impressive to be honest, and doesn't try to melt a hole through your desk like Hangouts.

I use it actively on both Mac and Linux.

Not affiliated with Zoom at all, just a very pleased user :)

https://talky.io/ works for a reasonable amount of people, but it's not ideal for regular calls and definitely not secure enough.

There is also https://www.bluejeans.com/ which usually works fine in the company.

Skype for Business? Lol. If only it was possible to _join_ a meeting without an account, that would be great.

EDIT: someone asked if I'm seriously recommending bluejeans; I am, yes. Indeed it's hilariously CPU heavy and their linux support is a joke, but it's still working compared to other solutions. At work we have some vidconf equipment in some rooms which can dial bluejeans on their own and they usually work pretty well, so yes.

I use meet.jit.si (or a self-hosted version of the software) pretty reguarly and am a big fan. It's probably broadly comparable to other things people have suggested since it actually powers a lot of other video solutions behind the scenes, but I like their little demo service because it doesn't require auth and is pretty bare bones.

Full disclosure: I was briefly on the Jitsi team.

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