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Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

element.io

61–70 of 130 posts

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#61
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tauri + Electron (or Hydrogen) provides a lightweight cross-platform Matrix client that doesn't rely on Electron... Meanwhile, Nheko, NeoChat, Fractal and others provide very usable lightweight native cross-platform Matrix clients too. Element is also working on its own experiments (TBA) based on matrix-rust-sdk.

Calling Fractal usable is maybe a bit of a stretch, but there are a lot of really good Matrix clients now!

Fractal-Next is really usable for me at least. (The times I've tried it) The only thing that is hindering it for me is the missing SSO-Support, but as soon as my MR is merged, it has SSO-Support

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#62

I feel if XMPP just had some better tools this push for Matrix would be unnecessary.

Yeah, I read Matrix's reasoning for not just improving XMPP and instead starting a new protocol, and I gave them a few years, and have to use matrix quite a bit and am consistently convinced it was the wrong choice and XMPP is the way to go.

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#64
post #63

Did anyone else try to install this? It just refreshes non stop for me when I access its domain.

works fine for me. if the app had launched i'd ask you to submit feedback (which ends up in our bugtracker). as it hasn't, can you file a bug on github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues with a copy of the javascript console so we can see what's breaking? you might also want to disable any weird browser extensions to see if that's to blame.

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#65

My only concern is does this expose your IP to participants? This is one benefit of Discord Voice channels vs Discord Calls (which are end to end but expose your IP to everyone on the call, and theirs to you, so much so, you just open a console log and you can see them all...).

Currently yes, but it's trivial to fix and we'll do so on Monday - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30570436

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tauri + Electron (or Hydrogen) provides a lightweight cross-platform Matrix client that doesn't rely on Electron... Meanwhile, Nheko, NeoChat, Fractal and others provide very usable lightweight native cross-platform Matrix clients too. Element is also working on its own experiments (TBA) based on matrix-rust-sdk.

i think you meant Tauri + Element

bah, so i did. doh

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give some insights on how you estimate the amount of effort of making Element Call competitive, performance-wise, with say Discord. I heard that Discord threw a lot of time and money at optimizing voice in their product. Can you just jump in and realistically compete? There are a lot of performance/latency/sound quality comparisons online of Mumble vs TeamSpeak vs Discord and recently Jitsi vs MS Teams vs Z…

The competitive gap with Discord in terms of media quality is probably something like: * Need a low-latency SFU. This should be very doable; not only are there a lot of good FOSS SFUs to build on top of these days, the history of the Matrix team is actually that we built VoIP stacks fulltime before we shifted focus to Matrix, and we've built MCUs and media servers of all flavours in the past. MSC3401 should also give…

Nice elaborate answer. Discord has noise cancellation by krisp. I believe it is offline only. That would be good enough I suppose. But I’m not sure whether it can be loaded in webasm so it works in the browser. (To meet the cross platform needs of Matrix/Element.)

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#68
There is some cool development going on with Matrix recently! Threaded messaging first and now group calls. I am especially excited for Safari Support as this is my personal pain-point with Jitsi Meet. Very excited to see this evolve into the Element client.

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#69

From my perspective, the really exciting thing about this that it works equally well in mobile web browsers as well as desktop web - clicking on a link on Mobile Safari should Do The Right Thing without having to install anything. Moreover, because it's built on Matrix, MSC3401 ( https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/group-... ) means that we'll finally have decentralised cascading video/voice confere…

Maybe a bit off-topic but will upcoming Matrix Live also be hosted via Matrix VoIP now? ^^

(At least the smaller ones like interviews where the number of participants is <=8 until compatibility with SFU is done)

Re: Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call

#70
post #63

Did anyone else try to install this? It just refreshes non stop for me when I access its domain.

works fine for me. if the app had launched i'd ask you to submit feedback (which ends up in our bugtracker). as it hasn't, can you file a bug on github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues with a copy of the javascript console so we can see what's breaking? you might also want to disable any weird browser extensions to see if that's to blame.

sure, appreciate the comment! :)

The main instance @ call.element.io also doesn't seem to work for me, but I chalked that up to (assumed) heavy server load.

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