Does anyone have any suggestions on a platform to facilitate Tip #4: Idling in a Videoconference Room? Zoom is the obvious choice, but wonder if anyone has built something better for this use case?
I would love to find anyone interested in trying out a tool for this -- contact me at carss.w@gmail.com or drop a name/email into the form at https://heysync.chat if that's you! I will have a simple version ready to try within a few weeks.
The idea is make asynchronous audio chat easy, in a context similar to slack. You can send audio easily in place of text and whoever you sent it to can listen to it live or later. Then they can get back to you the same way. Imagine a chat room with 5 people talking, where you can replay the whole thing and chime in later if you were busy. It's chat across time.
Again, if you're interested, please reach out!
I am light on with webtech and linux but I followed their "few commands and a shell script" install notes to get something working with LetsEncrypt https.
If you host the video centre, and everything is https out from there, it should be somewhat secure.
For business security you may want to go over it more carefully than my home bodgy job though.
Video: The default install sets up for 720p. It seems to start notably worse and then scale up to 720p within a minute, often much less. Some congestion control thing I expect.
You can set 1080p or other (lower too) resolution limits if you like. I tried 1080p but at ~6-7Mbit per connection outgoing my home internet 18MBit upload got saturated pretty quick! The default 720p has worked ok for up to 6 people for a few hours at a time. 1 of the people was Europe-to-Australia and seemed like anyone else. No huge lag times but some lag as you'd expect from that distance.
Audio: I note this separately as it seems to be handled separately by Jitsi. We've noticed it seems to tick along pretty well the same the whole time, whether the video is going up or down in resolution due to congestion or not. Audio quality seems fine. The mic makes more difference in quality than the audio codec.
Apps: Have a requirement to go into setting and put the URL for your own server. Otherwise it defaults to the public one. Bit awkward. It seems to suck down a lot of battery but I haven't benchmarked it against anything else. Maybe this is normal for camera/compression/decompression/display/network all at the same time?!
Other niceties: can share desktop/application, has a text chat side option too, has "hand up" indicator if someone wants to indicate they wish to speak - not that we've ever used it.
All in all, it works well for home personal use with 6 people so far. Definitely handy to have and I intend to keep one running for the future. Being able to send a link to my friends and show them my desktop, or vice versa, is handy if nothing else.
Edit - added App section
So far I've only tried it with 2 people but the CPU barely flinched (a 2 core basic VPS) - most of the heavy lifting seems to be happening client-side. Uses ~500 MB of RAM.
Initial impression: 5/5
[0] https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...
Two points:
- My only hitch you likely won't come across. The LetsEncrypt will need to update the cert every now and again(months?). On my ubuntu VM install there is a cron job for this. But I leave my VM turned off unless I need it, so every now and again I have to "leave it on for longer" and snapshot after it updates the cert.
- two people use might be a special case where it sets up Peer to peer. So you may wish to test with at least three people before using it in anger.
I won't be surprised to see Discord pivot to b2b in a few years and completely destroy Slack.
This would also be incredibly wasteful of bandwidth and CPU. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and if everyone in the Zoomy world kept a silent conference on in the background all day, the internet pipes [Zoom's especially] would be quite a bit more full, and my CPU would continue to churn unnecessarily.
Then there's the etiquette. What if people just start water-cooler-chatting? Maybe at a low volume it's OK, but I could see people leaving just because of too much laughter [yes laughter is annoying and yes I am a horrible person].
Avoids the waste of unused video over the network, but still gives a sense of your teammates being live people going about their day.