Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

meet.jit.si

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 293 posts

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#61

Post by ISO-morphism »

tootie wrote: post #57
ISO-morphism wrote: post #26

I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience comparison: Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts. Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts: Passable but grainy. Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screen…

I can't convince anyone to not use Facetime.

Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is awesome for a family/group of friends with iDevices.

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#62

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

neves wrote: post #34
neves wrote: post #28

We are using it intensely at my company and after some server upgrades it is working very well.

We've more than 500 simultaneous users.

> We've more than 500 simultaneous users.

1. Wow, 2. Anything special required to pull that off?

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#63

Post by Naac »

ricardobeat wrote: post #47
crazygringo wrote: post #41

I'm curious... between Whereby and Jitsi and I assume other browser-based video solutions relying on WebRTC... ...how big is the barrier these days to building a "videoconferencing platform" supporting millions of people... that runs on a single server? Because if you need to do is build a pretty website that essentially just keeps track of meeting names and the names and IP addresses of participants... ...while each…

It doesn't scale well beyond a handful of people. You need *N bandwidth to send and receive, and without a thing called 'simulcast' (creating multiple, different quality stream simultaneously) which doesn't have good browser support the quality is defined by the lowest common denominator. A central server solves many, many issues that result in better quality. Jitsi itself barely works on Firefox and not at all on mo…

On Linux at least, it simply does not work on Firefox. Something with webrtc, but I can't get video to work.

Basically, it's a known issue [0] and the response is that maybe it'll get fixed eventually :(

[0] https://community.jitsi.org/t/browser-support-warning-when-u...

EDIT: It seems firefox-stable works OK.

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#64

Post by generatorguy »

ISO-morphism wrote: post #61
tootie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't convince anyone to not use Facetime.

Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is awesome for a family/group of friends with iDevices.

My circles are all on zoom due to superior audio and video quality in zoom than FaceTime for groups. 1 on 1 still FaceTime

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#66

Post by ISO-morphism »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #55
ISO-morphism wrote: post #26

I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience comparison: Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts. Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts: Passable but grainy. Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screen…

> Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts. ... but why? Is it just a familiarity thing?

> familiarity

That's the disheartening part. Most hadn't used Hangouts before, one person suggested it due to social distancing, ~1hr into Hangouts call as we're struggling to add another member I introduce Jitsi and paste a link into the group chat. Used for ~15 minutes, then dropped and the manual invite process for hangouts began again - organizer couldn't find the option to generate a sharable link to a Hangouts call (it does exist).

"I don't like it, it's weird."

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#67

Post by fergbrain »

enriquto wrote: post #65

It's very disheartening that when you try to connect with firefox, it says you should use chrome. This is a direct stab in the heart of the people who would favor it over zoom because it is free software.

I use it with Firefox and it works just fine

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#68

Post by modzu »

ISO-morphism wrote: post #49
judge2020 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts. Hangouts (now Meet) is better geared towards GSuite orgs where you're already logged into Google since you have to be to access almost all of your other internal company/school resources, including gmail. It also solves the contacts problem since everyone will be in the company directory.

> Hangouts (now Meet) Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mir…

sounds about right until this time next year

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#69

Post by kgraves »

Brakenshire wrote: post #18

I was looking at the Matrix clients yesterday, to set up a video chat room for elderly relatives. Everything seems just a bit too confusing or unpolished. I want something simple, functional and cross platform. At the moment I’m feeling Zoom with scheduled meeting times is probably the best bet. I’ll test this out, but does anyone have any other thoughts, or any non-proprietary recommendations?

Zoom or Google Hangouts/Meet is your best bet.

I have not seen anything better than these unfortunately in the open source world that is as accessible or easy to use as those two.

Re: Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom

#70

Post by phendrenad2 »

Brakenshire wrote: post #12
jimbob45 wrote: post #2

What’s up with the name? I’m never going to get my boss on board with a malware-looking name like that.

Slightly surprised by the response, Jitsi seems fine to me. Is it worse than Slack?

I've noticed that a lot of people have an aversion to software that doesn't have a name that's made from English word(s). This is possibly because the most common software out there has this property, and so people subconsciously associate it with quality (exceptions abound, of course, Samsung, Adobe, but I think that you need to reach a certain size to break free from the negative stigma in English-speaking countries).

Come to think of it, this may be why Linux is still seen as an outsider to non-technical people, as though it were less of a serious product than Windows (which has an English word as a name).

Post reply on HN