Jitsi: More secure, more flexible, free video conferencing | Hacker News Reader

Jitsi: More secure, more flexible, free video conferencing

jitsi.org

57 pointsmarcodiego24 comments

Nice to see this here :-)

I'm one of the developers working on Jitsi Meet, feel free to AMA!

Thanks a lot for your software and platform ! (that I have been extensively using since 2 years !). In particular I love the fact that you only need to use an URL to join.

One suggestion though : the chat function is really limited (e.g. no way to resize the area. No convenient way to chat with only selected people within the meeting, no rich text...). Actually there were even some times when I have been using Jitsi with some people only for the chat functionality without audio/video (since it is one of the rare platforms that enable to join with just an URL without creating an account) yet I wish that the chat was a bit more sophisticated ;)

For large meetings, it would also be nice to see the hand raised in a list (so that people then take the floor in-order).

Thanks for the kind words!

The chat is quite limited indeed. Our primary use case is audio / video media, and we see chat as more of a "supporting" channel, to share links, etc.

Never say never though, given enough time, we could make it better :-)

Agreed that this should be a secondary consideration. A more advanced chat would be nice but not at the expense of video/audio. My main use for it (and would assume most users) is posting links like you mentioned.

If its free, how do you guys pay the bills?

We have a SaaS model called Jitsi as a Service (JaaS): https://jaas.8x8.vc and recently launched “components” which a way to connect your self-hosted instance to our cloud for PSTN dial-in support.

I love Jitsi Meet. My friends and I started using it during COVID and it's constantly improved. I host my own instance using docker and it's a breeze.

One issue that really prevents us replacing Mumble with it completely is lack of Push-to-talk [1], which is necessary for gaming etc. Do you know of anyone working on a native desktop app (open source or otherwise)?

[1] https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/issues/210

I have a UI question about Jitsi - can I hide every single camera preview including presenter camera and myself during a meeting, leaving only shared screen maximized to full app window? This is a limitation in Zoom, some previews are always visible there during a meeting, taking up display space.

Yes you can! While in “large view” mode, when you are looking at the large video / screen-share with all the thumbnails on the right, there is an arrow at the bottom pointing right wards. Click it and that will hide the filmstrip altogether just leaving the large view.

Thank you

What do you think the "more secure" part refer to?

What's the reason for this post? Any news? New release?

Jitsi is wonderful anyway, and it's my favorite Video solution these days. No comparison to Big Blue Button, which has horrible UX in my experience.

This has been my go-to for the past 2 years. No account required, no download. Just works and you can create a funny room name/URL.

I've used this a couple times and it worked smoothly for everyone. It's nice to just enter a call via the browser instead of being hounded to download and use the app. I've not used it during peak traffic hours so would be curious to know what others have found and how it compares to zoom or google meet.

We use a selfhosted instance on our internal network, it’s working more or less flawlessly - and all without sending our data to anyone but us.

We primarily use Jitsi Meet for meetings, and it works great for everyone. The lack of nag UI (download the app, etc.) is refreshing.

My favourite feature is the ability to paste in a YouTube URL into the "Share a video" function and stream the YouTube video in high quality / sound. Trying to share a video in Google Meet doesn't work, ironically.

Does anyone know of any books or resources that focus on the concept of a back-end application that allows you to stream video from A to Z in a performant way like Google Meet or Jitsi?

I find it exciting to have a tool that allows up to 100 participants at once right in the browser.

I don't think there is comprehensive information about that. We all do pretty much the same, implement the Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) model.

The idea is the SFU will receive a number of streams for each user (usually up to 3, in low, mid and high resolutions) and then it will forward one of them to each other participant depending on things like available bandwidth, requested video size, etc.

There are a number of Open Source implementations available, in case you want to study it deeper:

- Jitsi videobridge: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-videobridge

- Janus: https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway

- mediasoup: https://github.com/versatica/mediasoup

- (p)ion: https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu

- meddoze: https://github.com/medooze/media-server-node

And probably more!

Jitsi was (is?) based on WebRTC. Usual challenges about conferencing is, beyond 2 members, having n*m bandwidth is bad, and a solution is to centralize the streams.

I used it to give some classes online in Corona times. Part of the class was given with own videos uploaded to youT . This feature was very handy because every user streams in sync the video that you are presenting directly from youT So everyone get awesome quality, much better than sharing screen. And obviously love that you do not need to download an app to run it.

> Jitsi Videobridge passes everyone’s video and audio to all participants, rather than mixing them first.

This seems excessive. What would this mean for the bandwidth requirements for each participant?

This the current most used model. It trades having to do expensive mixing on the server with more bandwidth and vise streams on the clients.

Since each participant sends several resolutions, each receiver will only get what they ask for. In a “gallery” style view, each video is not in full HD, for example.

I had no idea. It's no wonder that things rapidly fall apart when a coworker visits their parents with bad internet.

BigBlueButton works also really nice.

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