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Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

dino.im

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Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#21

Post by puggsy »

halpert wrote: post #18

P2P group video calls don’t work well unfortunately. Most people barely have enough upload bandwidth to upload one video stream. Needing to upload a stream per peer is a nonstarter for most people.

From the article:

"Peer-to-peer calls require more bandwidth than calls routed through a server and are thus not suited for a large number of participants. In the future, we plan to also develop calls via a forwarding server to solve resource issues on the client side and to allow for calls with more participants."

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#22

Post by xiaomai »

toastercat wrote: post #20
xiaomai wrote: post #10

I run a group chat for my family. I recently switched my server from running plain Prosody to Snikket. People with phones use the Snikket android app, but my kids that are too young for phones join in with Dino. Dino is a really nice client. Snikket is pretty good as a phone client... I think maybe there is a way to get push notifications working through the standard Android infrastructure which would be an improveme…

> but my kids that are too young for phones join in with Dino Curious about this, since it seems to imply your kids use Linux desktops. How has that worked out?

Honestly, it's been pretty great. In general it's not something we think about much? Internet/chatting with friends/video games all just work (in terms of video games, they're mostly doing minecraft or pico-8 games... we try not to do _too_ much gaming anyway, but anything else they're doing is probably on the nintendo switch).

My daughter recently has started to do more artwork on the computer (she's using a Wacom tablet with Krita). I don't know much about that world. Maybe there are way better tools and she'll want to switch to one of those in the future? (Is that an ipad? some Adobe software?). I figure as they get older and develop their own opinions we can revisit what types of computers/software they use, but for now things are going good.

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#23

Post by ta-webrtc »

dgrin91 wrote: post #14

It looks like Dino is built on top of XMPP. How can you be both XMPP and peer to peer? Doesn't XMPP mean there is a server in the middle (even if its not centralized)?

In order to establish a peer to peer video call you need a signaling channel that both peers know about.

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#25

Post by ta-webrtc »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #5

What is the latency on this? Still looking for a call solution that makes you feel like you‘re in the same room…

Latency is as good as you can do when doing peer to peer calls, the trade off is bandwidth (and CPU, but mostly bandwidth).

Latency and non-terminated encryption (end-to-end, not point-to-point) is great, and for calls with 3 or fewer peers the stability is fine. More peers than that and you probably want a media router in the mix, which adds some latency (all the calls have to route through a central server) and the server typically has done termination of the encrypted call streams as it does its routing.

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#26

Post by solarkraft »

I love Dino! I want to tell all my friends to install it on their ... oh. Oh no. They use macOS and Windows.

I don't mean to be a downer, but if you want to reach a lot of people with your amazing software (not saying that you have to, but it seems like one of the intentions of the project), it's a good idea to get them where they already are.

Side note 1: Vala/GTK could be an amazing app development platform if the cross-OS story was clearly (it can absolutely cover desktop OSes and I think even phones, but how to do it isn't very clear and most GTK apps don't).

Side note 2: Dino seems to be co-developed by the guy who makes microG, another great piece of software (replaces Google services on Android).

Side note 3: It would be great to see an XMPP revival. Quality clients like Dino are a key part to this. An important part for that may be another standardization effort with a low number of groups of clearly defined XEPs to support some functionality (a huge problem appears to be the sheer number and fragmentation of XEPs).

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#27

Post by bufferoverflow »

The thing about video call apps is - seemingly, no matter how great the internet is on both ends, the video quality is still laggy and blocky. We have 30 Mbps on both ends. That's supposed to be near bluray quality. But that's not what we get. Even when I use the crappy 720p camera, what I get over the internet is much worse.

From our testing, Whatsapp is one of the worst. Zoom is in between. Hangouts is usually decent. But again, nowhere near bluray quality.

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#28

Post by crowbahr »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #27

The thing about video call apps is - seemingly, no matter how great the internet is on both ends, the video quality is still laggy and blocky. We have 30 Mbps on both ends. That's supposed to be near bluray quality. But that's not what we get. Even when I use the crappy 720p camera, what I get over the internet is much worse. From our testing, Whatsapp is one of the worst. Zoom is in between. Hangouts is usually dece…

I was shocked at how good the quality was in facetiming my in-laws on my wife's ipad. I've been using hangouts, signal, slack and duo for video calls and they were never nearly as crisp and nice as facetime was.

I think Discord was similarly good but... Discord just isn't what I'm going to voice call family on... realistically ever.

Re: Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

#29

Post by darknavi »

xiaomai wrote: post #22
toastercat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but my kids that are too young for phones join in with Dino Curious about this, since it seems to imply your kids use Linux desktops. How has that worked out?

Honestly, it's been pretty great. In general it's not something we think about much? Internet/chatting with friends/video games all just work (in terms of video games, they're mostly doing minecraft or pico-8 games... we try not to do _too_ much gaming anyway, but anything else they're doing is probably on the nintendo switch). My daughter recently has started to do more artwork on the computer (she's using a Wacom t…

I've never thought about having kids run a linux box, but as a non-linux daily driver I think it'd be quite interesting.

Looking back on my youth I think I'd be concerned with my kids installing bloatware, malware, etc. I feel like that whole genre of software would be much more challenging to install, which leaves me at two outcomes:

1) They don't install bloatware/malware. Excellent! 2) They figure out how to install bloatware/malware. Still pretty great as that means they are learning their environment.

I think being technically literate with your daily driver computer is crucial to daily success, so either way I think kids would do fine.

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