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Comment by ykevinator | Hacker News Reader

Anyone ever get jitsi to stay connected? We use Google meet daily but it's still half baked, we actually liked jitsi but could never keep it from dropping

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I’ve tried it for calls with a few people and didn’t have a lot of connection related issues. If you’re able to, you could self-host a Jitsi Meet instance at any cloud service provider with a geographically closer presence to you. I’ve been thinking of doing that but haven’t tried it yet.

Jitsi Meet does eat up phone/tablet batteries a lot and also causes a lot of heating. I guess it could still be optimized further to handle these better (improvements to the client and platform have been pushed all these months too).

I’m pretty sure all video conferencing tools cause a phone to heat up and lose battery: the camera, screen and radios are all constantly active

self hosting Jitsi is pretty easy. They have a whole bunch of scripts that does everything for you.

I tried Jitsi Meet in a conference call of forty people and we all switched to Google Meet because it was so unreliable and broken. This might have to do with compute limits on the server side (Kubernetes auto scaling?) but it didn’t work.

I use MS Teams wherever possible because it just works and most group calls I am on are in a business context anyways so the other integrations are pretty useful

I have it running on a 1cpu 1gb Ubuntu vps add can hold twenty or so people (audio only) at 15-40% cpu. (We're audio only because not everyone has good internet connections, and makes things run smoother). It's stable as a rock. Very impressed. The odd person will turn on video for no appreciable deficit to the rest, or the server.

I run a self hosted Jitsi instance for my student Club. We are using for meetings with up to 50 people in a weekly basis. Works pretty well. Everyone accept the speakers has to turn Video off at that scale. With Video it works reliable up to 15 people.

There are some tweaks regarding framerate and resolution but that only raises the limit slightly.

Videoconferencing

If you don't mind me asking, what sort of hardware and network did you use for self-hosting? I tested it out with a couple of people on a basic Digital Ocean droplet and it was spotty (quality dropped really quickly) and it convinced me not to bother persuading my family/friends to switch over for our calls

There's a useful thread of people reporting different server/users combinations that worked for them here: https://community.jitsi.org/t/recommended-server-specs-for-2...

Thanks

I use it for small Javascript meetups (15-45 people) and it works well for us. If the broadcaster has slow internet it pixelates badly though. This is using the free service they offer.

On our corporate network it always worked better than the official solutions Skype for Business (Lync) and WebEx. Sadly policy does not encourage/officially allow using it.

Jitsi currently struggles on Firefox. Works much smoother if you use Chromium (or Brave or something).

The only current issue I'm aware of is a regression in FF 80, which breaks screensharing, if participants are audio-only: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1663286

Just done jitsi on firefox on debian stable. At the end of a 2 hour session I got about 1 second of lag. No idea yet how I should even troubleshoot it, probably just going to chrome and see if it is better.

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