Ask HN: What are some open source alternative to Zoom | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some open source alternative to Zoom

30 pointsblohs19 comments

What are some self hosted preferably open source alternatives to zoom that also include text chat while on video meeting?

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I'm the creator of Peer Calls [1], a peer to peer video conferencing web app using WebRTC, and it has a basic chat functionality (sending files is a little quirky). The first release was back it in 2016. Users create a room and share the link.

It's built in NodeJS/React/TypeScript, and I just recently ported the backend to Go because I wanted to build a Selective Forwarding Unit using pion/webrtc. You can test this in the alpha release on peercalls.com/alpha [2].

Would love to get more feedback and/or bug reports! Open source, available on GitHub [3].

[1]: https://peercalls.com

[2]: https://peercalls.com/alpha

[3]: https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls

I discovered Peer Calls last night and think it’s an awesome project! It worked flawlessly from both my phone and desktop; it’s one of the (surprisingly few) fully featured WebRTC chat apps!

My one hope: Could it be possible to select from different audio bitrates when on a direct connection? High bandwidth audio seems like one of the huge selling points of P2P chat applications. My naive assumption is that it’s the sampleRate constraint on the audio stream, but I’m not sure how the compression works...

https://nextcloud.com/talk/

https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/

https://bigbluebutton.org/

https://openmeetings.apache.org/

https://github.com/havfo/multiparty-meeting

src: https://linuxfr.org/news/organiser-des-visioconferences-de-h...

Check out bigbluebutton [0]. It is open source with tons of features. It however requires specific Ubuntu 16.04 version and can only be installed on that OS. It is not the best fit for very large audiences (say over 200) in one session BUT for that they are working on another load balancing solution recently [1]

I have been using this for our clients (edtech) for a while and with their 2.2 official version, they made it HTML5 only and removed flash. Works really well if you follow all the guidelines and installation instructions.

They also have a bash installer script [2] which literally does everything for you in one single script.

[0] https://docs.bigbluebutton.org

[1] https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite

[2] https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-install

Do you have first hand experience with BBB?

yes I have installed it, ran it, configured it and broken it many times :). Feel free to ask me anything.

I use it as a student. It's very good and easy to use. I'm curious about the performance with many participants though as we only use it in classes with at most 40 persons. And of course no camera just the presentation.

Really enjoy BBB, we used as a replacement from Zoom when all the security stuff came out.

Jitsi?

[0] https://jitsi.org

Does anyone has experience using Jitsi here? What are your thoughts?

I have used it, and it works fine.

Use it. Love it. Looking to add the call-in feature next.

Found it to be pretty unstable compared to zoom, especially when you get more people on it. Trying to convince people to use it is frustrating.

Especially the hosted version: would it work for 30 ppl?

Jitsi works great for me. Just know that using it with Firefox is not optimal, particularly for > 2 participants due to certain bandwidth optimizations not being available on Firefox. This pains me as a Firefox user.

Observed that firefox 47 and 60 clients kill the stream for all participants. firefox 68 works fine. Not sure why a client failure would cause a crash on the server but it's not a great experience.

posted this on another thread as well, looked at Jitsi and someone from our security team pointed out this open authentication issue: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/5720

best alternative i've seen so far was a webrtc setup with okta authentication. https://github.com/rdegges/chatapp

Jitsi Meet, Matrix or Nextcloud Talk. See more here [1]

[1] https://www.peter.saarland/hosted-homeoffice

Jitsi Meet

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