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How Zoom works [slides]

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Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#51

Post by Lex-2008 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #45

Modern Browser have already build in, p2p, encrypted video chat functionality. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/... I played around with it years ago, and it worked quite good and should have improved a lot since then, so why has no one come up with a solid solution, that does not require us to route our video calls through china, or microsoft servers? I suppose the devil is, like always, i…

Yes. From my experience (as a user), webrtc is good for up to 4 people, and is rarely supported for more than 8. Reason is that few laptops can cope with many more incoming and outgoing videostreams in parallel.

Also, when in our company we tried using webrtc for standups, we often faced issues when participant A couldn't hear participant B, but participant C could hear them both. All that with video working in all directions. Or sometimes we had this issue with video.

Another reason why standalone applications like Skype and Zoom (which is known for trying to install its client too much) might be better than webrtc is that they might have better noise-cancelling algorithms than browsers.

Also, point of usability - compared to browser, standalone apps don't have permission dialogs ("do you want to allow this website to access your camera"?) and might be smarter with choosing correct microphone by default - this might be important for non-techy users who don't understand why system suggests them to choose from two microphones when there's only one plugged into the computer.

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#52

Post by xxs »

mywacaday wrote: post #35
fnord123 wrote: post #6

Title is "How Zoom works". It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype. The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bi…

Skype is dead in the water, has been suffering for years since the push to Teams started. Teams behaves a lot more stable in an enterprise environment, whether that is by design or neglect I'm not sure.

Teams is a horrid, horrid product that eats tons of memory and has no history to speak of (takes like 15sec to load previous hour - on 300Mbit up/down connection). Dealing with large html paste is not even a bad joke. Making incoming calls on the phone, while chatting with another person on the pc is beyond any reason.

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#53

Post by jmchuster »

hutzlibu wrote: post #45

Modern Browser have already build in, p2p, encrypted video chat functionality. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/... I played around with it years ago, and it worked quite good and should have improved a lot since then, so why has no one come up with a solid solution, that does not require us to route our video calls through china, or microsoft servers? I suppose the devil is, like always, i…

That is what the browser apps use, like Google Meet, Facebook Messenger, Discord.

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#54

Post by jchw »

fnord123 wrote: post #6

Title is "How Zoom works". It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype. The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bi…

> It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows

Nitpick: I believe it was only Qt on Linux. (I know the core of it was once Delphi as well, i believe that was purely not UI though.)

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#55

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #50
fnord123 wrote: post #6

Title is "How Zoom works". It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype. The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bi…

Skype was never a nicely working Qt program, I remember articles about their ultra-aggressive anti-reverse engineering coding techniques from 10 years ago or older. They used self-modifying code and undocumented opcodes, active prevention of debuggers and disassemblers, etc., basically every trick in the book to keep someone from finding out what Skype is actually doing.

But it worked... nicely. Meaning it did what it was supposed to do at least, quickly, with little resources, few bugs etc.

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#56

Post by for_xyz »

fnord123 wrote: post #6

Title is "How Zoom works". It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype. The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bi…

"It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows"

Skype was originally written in Delphi on Windows. Linux and OSX ports used QT.

Nowadays the Skype app is just single codebase written in React Native and it targets multiple platforms: UWP, Electron, Android and iOS.

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#57

Post by montroser »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #26
fnord123 wrote: post #6

Title is "How Zoom works". It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype. The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bi…

The linux client does work. Its pretty bad, but the one redeeming feature that it has over Zoom is that I can turn off incoming video. I am in a country with poor internet, and when no one is sharing their screen, I prefer to turn off incoming (and outgoing) video. Others can continue to benefit from seeing each other on video, while I get to talk and hear them properly.

We've switched from zoom to https://team.video and have been loving it.

They have a "low bandwidth" mode you can toggle on, that just turns off your outgoing and incoming video streams. I think it still tries to send around screen shares though, for better or worse.

It has made a huge difference for some team members with very challenged Internet connectivity where they can just put themselves in low bandwidth mode and the call carries on.

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#58

Post by michaelt »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #55
jonathanstrange wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype was never a nicely working Qt program, I remember articles about their ultra-aggressive anti-reverse engineering coding techniques from 10 years ago or older. They used self-modifying code and undocumented opcodes, active prevention of debuggers and disassemblers, etc., basically every trick in the book to keep someone from finding out what Skype is actually doing.

But it worked... nicely. Meaning it did what it was supposed to do at least, quickly, with little resources, few bugs etc.

I'm an Electron-hater in general, but are you forgetting the fact Skype for Linux didn't support group video calls until the Electron version?

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#59

Post by danogentili »

Lex-2008 wrote: post #51
hutzlibu wrote: post #45

Modern Browser have already build in, p2p, encrypted video chat functionality. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/... I played around with it years ago, and it worked quite good and should have improved a lot since then, so why has no one come up with a solid solution, that does not require us to route our video calls through china, or microsoft servers? I suppose the devil is, like always, i…

Yes. From my experience (as a user), webrtc is good for up to 4 people, and is rarely supported for more than 8. Reason is that few laptops can cope with many more incoming and outgoing videostreams in parallel. Also, when in our company we tried using webrtc for standups, we often faced issues when participant A couldn't hear participant B, but participant C could hear them both. All that with video working in all d…

It really depends on your configuration (server-side configuration also plays an important role). Jitsi has an excellent webrtc server-side SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit) which does a seamless job at redirecting multi-layer VP8/H264 streams to the most appropriate user.

Each jitsi browser instance tells webrtc to encode and send multiple spatial layers of the same video stream (at different qualities), allowing users (and the SFU) to automatically choose which one to receive, according to bandwidth and network congestion.

The result is a seamless experience that just works, even with 16+ people (we've been doing jitsi conferences nearly every working day since April at our dance school, it works like a charm and is easily customizable).

Other solutions also use custom additional WASM modules for echo cancelation and noise suppression in webrtc; and jitsi has an excellent dropdown UI with previews for choosing audio/video sources (and sinks!).

Re: How Zoom works [slides]

#60

Post by ew6082 »

coronadisaster wrote: post #20
fnord123 wrote: post #6

Title is "How Zoom works". It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype. The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bi…

10 years ago is about when Microsoft purchased Skype... If I remember correctly they received money from the government to do it and then stopped using the P2P supernodes model and switched to their own servers to track users more easily... It used to work great, I wish the pre-MS source code would get leaked.

The Skype client of today is just a renamed Lync client, which actually used to be decent. They've done nothing but make it worse since Lync ceased to exist.
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