Ask HN: Any good open source video conferencing options? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any good open source video conferencing options?

26 pointsliumaiyi22 comments

Came across [Jitsi](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/tag/v2023.7.2) and [BigBlueButton](https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton), does anyone have experience of running these or others in production?

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I have used Jitsi for our small business and it has been essentially trouble-free. I would recommend it if you want a self-hosted solution, but as there are free options that don't require anything (including the meet.jit.si instance), I don't know if there's any purpose to using a self-hosted solution at all.

I've never hosted my own jitsi instance, but I use it quite frequently for a variety of purposes both personal and professional. It is, in my opinion, the best of all the conference systems out there, FLOSS or otherwise.

Every other solution has consistent technical problems for me, worse hurdles for adoption (with jitsi, I just send a link to friends, nothing to download or install), significant dark patterns, or awful performance. Jitsi has none of that, and on top of it, is privacy-respecting and focused on the public good.

All the best,

-HG

How does it work when you talk to someone across the world? Is there more of a lag than zoom/meet etc?

My team is geographically distributed both across the US and elsewhere in the world. Even when talking with people based completely across the globe, I've never had jitsi be the bottleneck, and its performance settings let you tweak things far more usefully than any of the other platforms (in my experience).

All the best,

-HG

Not sure what you mean by production, but we have run a couple of multi-hour meetings with Jitsi with no complaints.

how did you manage everything?

We declared a conference name, then add that to the jitsi url and bingo: we have a meeting.

While we have yet to attempt to record meetings, it's been suggested that doing so is not as easy as on zoom. Still looking.

From their FAQ:

> Can I record a Jitsi conference? > Yes. The easiest way to record is to live stream your conference to YouTube and access the recording there. You can try this now on meet.jit.si. Self-installed Jitsi Meet deployments will need to setup [Jibri](https://github.com/jitsi/jibri) to do this.

I think you may be confusing the freely available Jitsi service with what OP is asking about: self-hosting a Jitsi server and using that.

I have run bitbluebutton for our elearning/LMS company. It is a good tool for personalized learning with smaller audience and ideally built for Learning. However, you cannot use it effectively to run large webinars etc easily in 1 session.

If you train class sizes of say 20-30 in 1 session, you can run BBB and it will do a decent job. With their HTML5 release couple of years ago, everything now runs on WebRTC for the most part and they also allow using TURN and STUN servers.

THe caveat is that it requires dedicated servers to run with some minimum specs. You cannot run it in production on a virtualized VPS (you potentially could but they don't recommend).

I setup a jitsi server during the pandemic on a small linode instance I run using their docker compose setup which was pretty effortless. It only took me a few minutes to get going and has been rock solid for my use cases.

Another option:

https://openmeetings.apache.org/

For those of you who have used Jitsi, BigBlueButton or others in production, curious about a few things:

1. What is the largest number of users they can handle in one meeting 2. How is the text chat experience? 3. Do you have a good experience with their mobile app versions? Is switching between desktop and mobile seamless?

I think you'd get better responses if you gave more details.

Are the participants mostly on phones or desktops or laptops? How many participants per meeting (average, max); how many meetings and/or participants total?

https://tlk.li ?

Source code: https://github.com/vasanthv/talk

I've moved to Jitsi (meet.jit.si) for my office hours and so far and I'm pretty happy with it.

In my experience it has better cross-browser support than Google Meet, which tends to misbehave on Safari/FF.

no kidding: opening Google Meet in Firefox on Windows instantly crashes it, every window. As I routinely keep 300+ tabs open, this makes me sad.

since FF is my main browser I have to take care to manually open Meet links in Chrome

I've never self-hosted Jitsi but have heard it's not too bad to setup. Web version works fine for a lot of things I do with school and my students.

I have manage a cluster of BigBlueButton ("BBB") servers for our university. If you are looking at Jitsi give that one a try as well, although I am nor the right person to ask on the specific sifferences as I don't know Jitsi all that well.

Yep. Ran one during most of the pandemic: https://github.com/rcarmo/azure-ubuntu-jitsi

Yes we implemented Jitsi in our one our apps. Was working fine.

https://vdo.ninja/ is pretty good but not sure if OSS.

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