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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

> find another solution

Have you tried Jitsi?

Jitsi is great! If they can figure out a good webinar solution it could be an absolute killer. As it stands, it's (in my opinion) really just useful for small scale interactive meetings at this point, not 100+ participant events.

It's really great as a face-to-face solution though, where Zoom and many others are actually kind of overkill.

BigBlueButton may be better for that scale. It's interesting this desire for a one size fits all video conference.

I cant imagine being productive with 100+ peoples in a video-conference (not even real ones), are you making raves/partys over Jitsy?

I should've made it clear when I say "events" I mean more webinar style events. 100+ participant meetings where everyone is an equal participant isn't useful, but that sort of thing isn't uncommon if you're holding all hands calls or annual shareholder meetings etc.

Yeah but then a streaming solution with a separate voting/chat/messaging solution is the way to go.

Well, no – not if you still need audience participation with video and/or audio. Things like annual/quarterly meetings and such where people have a right to speak etc. It's really not that different from a typical video conference, just that the moderator has controls to mute/unmute people and participants can't unmute themselves. Polling/voting/chat features I reckon are secondary I reckon.

I've wanted to like Jitsi, but the quality difference with Zoom is noticeable. Same with Google Meet and anything I've seen that uses WebRTC. They remind me of RealPlayer back in the early 2000s in terms of blockyness.

I would love to know about any Zoom competitors, free or paid, with comparable quality.

Wire.com may be of interest to you. I have been checking out a few as well.

Jitsi Meet works fine as long as you do not use Firefox.

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/

And this is better: https://bloggeek.me/when-will-zoom-use-webrtc/

> Jitsi Meet works fine as long as you do not use Firefox.

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.

I had some issues with Jitsi on Brave but it worked fine on Chrome

Sorry, works on my Firefox quite ~well BUT uses 3 time's more CPU...so there's that ;)

If you have your own jitsy server, you can define the max quality up to 1080p i think, the free jitsy service/server has probably really low 'max' video quality.

BigBlueButton is also interesting, but it's more like a Schooling-tool...but also without a client (aka just need a browser)

It's a bit difficult to understand what exactly that means.

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.

I think @hanniabu is referring to Jitsi Meet in this case...

Why is it difficult? Is there not enough context given the conversation is specifically focused on video conference software.

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.

I think you’re overstating the complexity a bit. When people mention Zoom I don’t fuss over whether it’s desktop, web (do they even offer it?), mobile, or whatever.

> do they even offer it?

Just to answer this—technically yes, but they use dark patterns to dissuade people from learning about it.

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