Show HN: MiroTalk – an alternative to Zoom / Teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MiroTalk – an alternative to Zoom / Teams

github.com

144 pointsmp8546 comments

Open articleView on HN

GitHub: https://github.com/miroslavpejic85/mirotalksfu

Live Demo: https://sfu.mirotalk.org/

[1] It's an Open Source made for You completely Free

[2] You can video call, chat, screen share, share files, use the whiteboard, recording and more

[3] No download, plug-in or login required, entirely browser based

[4] No rooms and users limitation, it holds online meetings for an Unlimited time.

[5] Self-hosted (run it to Your own website or application)

[6] Desktop and Mobile compatible

[7] Can grow further Thanks to Your contribution

Nothing is really ours until we share it.

C.S.Lewis

Interesting project.

It might be worth noting that there is the project https://galene.org/ which aims at achieving the same goals as MiroTalk (self hosted, open source), but with a subset of features (no file sharing) and written in Go.

I'm not affiliated with them, but I like what Galène is doing.

Hello acatton, Thanks, I’m very happy that you found MiroTalk an interesting project!

It is also one of the only OSS projects I know with support for SVC (scalable video).

You mention on the github that you're running this demo on a lightweight 1GB/1vCPU VM - how many calls/concurrent users can this support with that hardware?

i would love to know too

If it's acting as a STUN service, to just enable peering around NAT, you'd struggle to hit a limit.

If you need to pass data between clients via a TURN server, bandwidth is your limiting factor, well before CPU.

How does it compares with jitsi?

Hello gus_massa, Jitsi seems to not have file sharing between participants and the collaborative whiteboard. What do you think about it?

[I'm not answering what you asked, but I hope it's useful anyway.]

I'm in charge of a dozen of T.A. in the university, and for the virtual Math clases each has been using Zoom/Meet/Teams/Jitsi. (I actually don't remember if someone used Jitsi for the clases.) The T.A. have a very strong opinion about which one is the best, and one of the reasons is the whiteboard support.

I think it's worth noting this is largely an implementation on top of the Mediasoup SFU project. MiroTalk is not really the SFU here. It's just a client and server side API built on top of an existing open source SFU. And they don't appear to mention this or credit Mediasoup for this anywhere. It's a cool project, very useful and appears to be in full compliance with mediasoup licensing... but it still feels a little disingenuous to label it as an SFU.

Unless they've changed it in the last 45 minutes, the first line of the description says: "Powered by WebRTC and SFU integrated server." and "SFU" is a link to the Mediasoup website.

I guess that's fair. I missed the 3 letter hyperlink in the Github README. Would be nice if some credit was given on https://sfu.mirotalk.org/ Normally I would not be so pedantic about the use of a library, but mediasoup is doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting that makes this possible.

Edit: I see the mediasoup project is also listed by name in the credits section. So I rescind my earlier comment. I still think it's a fine line to call this project itself an SFU though.

Hello mionhe welcome, that you mentioned It has been there since the first commit (103 days ago) :)

Hi ciarlill, thanks for saying it's a Cool project :) credits are always due, if you look at the references cited there are from the first commit. All the best

Would be nice for these systems to support an arbitrary RTMPS so that you can stream to non-YouTube systems (such as Vimeo live, etc.)

Hello rexreed, thanks for the good tips, any idea is always well accepted.

You got it! I'm always looking for an alternative to Zoom for webinars and webcasting. I usually stream from Zoom to another source where we can have thousands of attendees without having them all join the Zoom session. For MiroTalk to be a good alternative, it needs to support arbitrary RTMPS streaming. Also making sure that our presenters won't have ports blocked is a big issue.

I wish there was a better alternative to YouTube / Vimeo Live for big streaming though, but that might be a much harder thing to do given bandwidth constraints.

You can always use owncast in place of YT or Vimeo Live, with a S3-like service it's highly scalable.

Got me looking into it! Do you use OBS or a different RTMP streamer or just Owncast directly? I'm looking for more audience engagement in the form of polls, Q&A support as well as visual overlays such as bottom thirds, frames, etc.

I use it alongside OBS and ffmpeg for automated streams, works well.

Can someone tell how does Microtalk have any specific advantages over Nextcloud talk which is also opensource and self hostable?

Looks interesting. Has the right license. (AGPLv3)

Hello still_grokking, welcome & thank you ;)

LOL I love the "meet the team" section

Indeed, beautifully honest.

Hello frans, thank you, I'm glad you like it :)

Miro would love the free brand name promotion

Miro is a name, they don't have a monopoly on it.

sorry I don't care, I read the title and think of Miro immediately, maybe it's just me

I use Miro often and only thought of it when you mentioned it.

okay, so you don't care. and I'm supposed to care... why?

Worth noting that Miro got its start using the name of another popular software offering also called Miro. If you look up Miro on Algolia HN, most of the discussions are still around the prior Miro OSS software.

no one said you should care, I made a throwaway comment, and then you commented as if you think I think you owe me an explanation.

I was looking for a self hosted web conferencing tool within our LAN. This looks promising.

Hello anyfactor, thank you so much.

How does this compare to Jami, especially some of the latest features?

Hello rexreed, Seems p2p, There is also MiroTalk P2P [1], Live Demo [2]

[1] https://github.com/miroslavpejic85/mirotalk

[2] https://mirotalk.up.railway.app/

Before opening the link I though it was a new service embedded in Miro [0].

You might benefit from choosing a name that doesn't associate you with an existing and widely used collaboration tool.

[0] https://miro.com/

Hello cassianoleal, ha ha ha, Thanks for the tips, miro is also my second name :)

Hey! Well, that's a coincidence! :)

Initially I thought you'd be setting yourself up for getting sued. It being your second name might complicate matters though. In any case, it will certainly cause confusion!

Many people are named Miro, why didn't the collaboration tool consider this?

How does the title relate to the linked page? I don't see seven reasons listed there.

Hello 6581, The project is Open source [1] and here the demo [2]

[1] https://github.com/miroslavpejic85/mirotalksfu

[2] https://sfu.mirotalk.org/

The seven reasons are written at the bottom of the page, the first comment.

We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Show HN: 7 reasons why MiroTalk it's an alternative to Zoom / Teams" but that's was a bit clickbaity, which is against the site guidelines (see also the one about numbers in titles): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Hello dang, You right, sorry, thank you very much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com