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Not Using Zoom

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Re: Not Using Zoom

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried once to connect to teams on firefox mobile in a private tab just to send a simple message (not a video call) and tell my coworkers I had a medical emergency and was heading to an hospital. After passing my company's azure SSO login prompts all I got was an error message I had to use Chrome or Mirosoft Edge

Firefox mobile is useless. I tried to use it. I really tried. Finally I had to uninstall it to preserve my sanity.

This was a message fron the app, not a failure on firefox mobile's part and I didn't expect any videocall to work, just to be able to send a message in a chat.

Re: Not Using Zoom

#202

I came directly to the comments to recommend Jitsi instead. Glad the author made the same early in the article.

With the maturing of WebRTC and related technologies, shouldn't it be dead simple by now to create an online video conferencing application that runs completely in the browser?

With more than two participants, real-time peer to peer video needs a lot more bandwidth on your local internet connection, compared with a hub. That's because you need to send your AV stream to all the other participants in separate streams, instead of one stream to the hub. Same for what you receive, as the hub sends you a composite of the current speaker and thumbnail videos of everyone else.

Most people don't have a network at home that can handle, say, sending 50 copies of your AV stream when you're speaking to 50 other participants. With that many, even audio-only is a challenge.

There are some clever p2p relay mechanisms you could use in theory to bring the bandwidth down to not grow as much with number of participants (but still a constant factor more than the hub method), but they would add significant latency. For example your AV is sent to one peer, they send it to the next peer, and so on in a chain or tree. This works well for non-real-time AV like p2p distribution of movies, but not real-time meetings.

If multicast IP worked over the internet at large that would help but it doesn't work. Even if it did it wouldn't be enough for the full-vs-thumbnails continuous renegotiation needed to keep download bandwidth steady, nor could it do per-user quality-vs-rate adaptation.

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