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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Inter-operable video and phone conferencing without prior setup required. Probably half the video conferences I’ve tried to participate in in the last year have been a disaater, with people having technical problems dialing in, dropping out, etc. Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality. I want to be able to email some people a link, and with no account creation, registration, or software install required, get an extrwmely high quality low latency (comparable to FaceTime) voice/video conference.

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I have been using jitsi for the past year or so and the experience is pretty much what you describe.

https://meet.jit.si

I used to use this in my company and while joining and creating meetings is pretty painless the audio/video quality was pretty crap. Perhaps they have improved in the three years since I've used it.

It's pretty good now.

Even phone confernces (using VOIP conference providers) have awful quality.

VoIP, especially multi-tenant voip like conferencing is 70% dependent on YOUR local network connection and 30% the provider's infrastructure. Having a high bandwidth pipe is no guarantee for 100% clear and jitterless voip communication. Have you had a network engineer take a deep inspection of voip traffic to see if there's any QoS or packet filtering going on that could degrade performance (i.e. if you're a small office that has your voice traffic occurring side by side with literally every other network device you're GOING to have a bad time).

Amazon has the entire company dogfooding Chime[0]. Pretty happy with it. Really good for video/phone conferences. Half-decent imitation of slack for chatting.

You can join a concall via phone number + pin, from your desktop, or from the mobile app. The mobile app will even let you view screenshares or video conf.

[0]https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

I personally didn't mind it, but I saw a lot of dislike of Chime internally compared to something like Slack. Anecdotal of course. Worked great for large chat groups though.

The place I work uses BlueJeans and I really like it.

The dedicated app runs on just about everything'; iOS, OSX, Windows, Android.

On phones you can use Video and Audio or just plain Audio (Low Bandwidth mode).

You can send your BlueJeans room URL and they can join with just a web browser (Web browsers get less features though). Non-Hosts can join the meeting without signing up for anything. They just click and join.

I think the audio and video is pretty good. Much better than Facetime, which is not a good comparison because Facetime is pretty terrible. Audio quality is good.

There is dedicated hardware that supports BlueJeans so you can use it in conferences rooms.

You can record meetings.

All the standard stuff like screen share and what not. You can even ping pong back and forth. I worked with someone where they had to type in some stuff and I had to type in other stuff on their computer. They just joined my BlueJeans room and when I was not typing, they could type. No clicking to take control or give it back, it was more or less seamless.

I also want a screen for the audio/video conference to show where the sound is coming from, so we can mute that one guy who doesn't turn his mike off and is heavy breathing on the call.

We've been using http://appear.in/ and it's worked perfectly for zero setup video conferencing.

Full disclosure. I work for Synergy Sky. For a single person our products are way too cumbersome, but if your issue is also on the level of an organisation/company, then your problem is what we solve.

We pay for a high-end solution at work and still experience the same issues.

Have you tried appear.in ?

I’ve used it several times and while the UI was nice the audio quality was poor every time. It doesn’t seem to handle audio feedback loops as well as other videoconferencing tools.

Try using Ethernet instead of wireless, and make sure you have a decent router.

maybe uberconference.com?

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