[HN Gopher] JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       JaaS: The team that builds Jitsi can now also run it for you
        
       Author : buovjaga
       Score  : 380 points
       Date   : 2021-01-28 06:53 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (jitsi.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (jitsi.org)
        
       | robertkrahn01 wrote:
       | CoScreen, an app sharing and pair programming tool [1] runs on
       | Jitsi / JaaS. I work on that project. We're really happy with the
       | service since a reliable and fast global infrastructure is key
       | for what we offer.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.coscreen.co
        
         | zelphirkalt wrote:
         | Is it only available for MacOS? When I go to the download page,
         | it only shows me download for MacOS.
        
           | sverhagen wrote:
           | Under the download button it says:
           | 
           | > or join the waitlist for Windows and Linux
        
             | PietKachelhout wrote:
             | But that Typeform has too many questions.
        
           | robertkrahn01 wrote:
           | Yeah, we're are currently working on Windows, it's almost
           | ready. Expect a first beta in a few weeks.
        
         | aloer wrote:
         | Can you tell us a little bit about the technology you use to
         | make the virtual screen work on MacOS?
         | 
         | Someone recently posted something requiring an "HDMI dummy
         | plug" (a fake display adapter?) to create a virtual screen. How
         | did you solve it on a pure software level?
         | 
         | I would like to understand better what kind of api access your
         | solution requires and I have trouble finding the right words to
         | google.
         | 
         | - I assume you have to use undocumented internal APIs?
         | 
         | - do you have to inject code into higher privileged processes
         | such as the Dock or window manager?
         | 
         | Edit: your page looks broken on mobile Safari with content
         | blockers enabled via Firefox focus. The whole part above fold
         | stays white
        
         | mstade wrote:
         | Hi! This looks great. I'm assuming it being free is temporary,
         | do you have any information on future pricing?
        
           | robertkrahn01 wrote:
           | Thank you! We've not yet made a final decision about pricing
           | yet, the first priority is to make it as reliable as we can
           | and support multiple OS. However, there will very likely be
           | some kind of free tier, similar to Slack and Zoom.
        
         | emmanueloga_ wrote:
         | This looks really polished (...at least judging by the great
         | marketing video...) will have to try it!.
         | 
         | May I ask how long have you guys been working on this? Just
         | curious :-)
        
           | robertkrahn01 wrote:
           | Thanks :) The idea has been around for a number of years but
           | only beginning of last year (pre covid) we made the leap and
           | started working full time on the project.
        
       | cloogshicer wrote:
       | Does anybody know a video conferencing tool with low CPU usage
       | while screen sharing? All the tools I've tried, including Jitsi,
       | slow down my computer to a crawl.
        
         | mguerville wrote:
         | I've had similar issues and have not found a tool that
         | cooperated better. Here are a few things that helped though: -
         | App police (mac app) to reduce cpu allocation for any given app
         | - unplug external display monitor during video calls - turn off
         | any video enhancing settings in app (mirror video, enhanced
         | light, etc) as well as virtual background or background blur
         | 
         | It's crazy that I'm 2021 we don't have video calling that isn't
         | a ginormous performance hog
        
           | kwindla wrote:
           | > It's crazy that I'm 2021 we don't have video calling that
           | isn't a ginormous performance hog
           | 
           | It sure is. On the other hand, the big tech companies did not
           | view video calls as a critical use case until ~9 months ago.
           | 
           | You can see this in how much Chrome has improved in its last
           | 3 releases. A year ago, you could play ~15 videos
           | simultaneously in a page on Chrome before <stalling, chaos,
           | and crashing>. Now, on the same machine, you can play >50.
           | This matters for video calls because the standard stream
           | topology these days for multi-party calls is 1 up, N down,
           | where N is the number of participants in the call.
           | 
           | Hardware and OS support is critical, too, so this is an
           | ecosystem challenge.                 - encoder pipelines
           | don't do low-resolution streams very well, which matters for
           | large video calls       - encoder pipelines don't do variable
           | framerate, variable resolution, large resolution/low-
           | framerate, and "non-standard" resolutions as well as they
           | could       - hardware support for newer codecs (vp9, h265,
           | av1) would help       - decoder pipelines aren't great at
           | decoding lots of small videos in parallel
           | 
           | Everyone focused on single-stream video playback for the last
           | few years, which led to really amazing improvements
           | _watching_ video. Nobody complains anymore about their fan
           | spinning up every time they watch Netflix. Now we have to put
           | the same effort into the building blocks needed for video
           | calls.
        
             | cloogshicer wrote:
             | Thank you for the detailed reply.
             | 
             | On the one hand, yes, it's a hard problem, on the other
             | hand, if you think about how much a modern video game does
             | 60 times per second, it's not that hard anymore.
             | 
             | That said I agree with a lot of your points and I totally
             | get why it is this way. It's just sad that it's mainly due
             | to business reasons.
             | 
             | I think part of it that video conferencing is too
             | cheap/free. It's just a bad business to be in.
        
               | kwindla wrote:
               | > On the one hand, yes, it's a hard problem, on the other
               | hand, if you think about how much a modern video game
               | does 60 times per second, it's not that hard anymore.
               | 
               | Agreed! Modern GPUs are amazing, as is the software stack
               | on top of them. (Crufty, fragile, maddening, inconsistent
               | ... and amazing.)
               | 
               | For the next-gen needs of video calling, some combination
               | of Nvidia, Apple, Intel, Arm, Microsoft, Google, codec IP
               | owners, and a bunch of mobile chipset manufacturers are
               | going to have to agree on a bunch of stuff. That never
               | happens in a logical, straightforward way.
               | 
               | For the past 10 years Nvidia has been betting that a
               | really big chunk of their future growth will come from
               | powering machine learning applications of all kinds.
               | They're probably ... right? (I mean, I have no idea.) But
               | as someone who cares a lot about video and only
               | intramurally about machine learning, I find that
               | frustrating. There's a lot of relatively low-hanging
               | fruit, from a technical perspective, in hardware codec
               | support.
        
           | cloogshicer wrote:
           | Thanks for your response! Unfortunately I'm already doing all
           | those things.
           | 
           | Agreed, I think it's insane. How come there isn't a single
           | App out there that works well for such a key technology? I
           | guess it's a really hard problem to solve.
        
         | kwindla wrote:
         | As a user, I think Google Meet probably has the most cpu-
         | friendly default settings for screensharing. They limit the
         | framerate to 5fps, and they're careful to use either the native
         | size of the screen or half the native size (which avoids at
         | least some expensive scaling code paths).
         | 
         | This is hard/impossible to get right on every machine, because
         | encoder implementations vary widely across all the hardware and
         | operating system combinations. For example, using h264 instead
         | of vp8 might help with cpu usage a _lot_ on an older macOS
         | machine, but make cpu usage worse on a newer macOS machine or
         | some specific windows machine.
         | 
         | Here are settings we recommend to developers building apps that
         | include screen-sharing using our video APIs:
         | https://gist.github.com/kwindla/5d5a8190aee36dc00a5ef8e6c901...
         | 
         | Max-width of 640 for the camera. Max-width of 1920 for the
         | screenshare, framerate limited to 5fps, and manually decimate
         | the screenshare width by half if it's larger than 1920. ymmv,
         | but these settings use ~30% of the cpu on a typical mid-range
         | Windows or macOS machine, for the sending side of a two-person
         | cam+screenshare call.
        
           | cloogshicer wrote:
           | Hey, thank you for the recommendation and detailed info!
           | Sadly Google meet is empirically one of the worst one, even
           | without screen sharing CPU hovers at ~60%, with screen
           | sharing it's completely unusable.
           | 
           | My use case is live coding sessions in education btw.
        
             | kwindla wrote:
             | I'm always interested in data points, so thank you! If you
             | don't mind, I'd love to hear what hardware/OS you're using.
             | We have a lot of test devices, and it sounds like your
             | particular setup is one that Google (and possibly we)
             | aren't doing a good job factoring into our settings
             | defaults/workarounds/special cases. So I think we maybe
             | need another test device. :-)
        
         | rkangel wrote:
         | Fundamentally, generic screen sharing is going to involve
         | running a video encoder live (because that's what you're doing
         | - generating a video stream of your desktop). Something needs
         | to do that work, and unless your GPU can it's going to be the
         | CPU.
         | 
         | The only way around it that I know is a 'remote desktop' type
         | protocol where you send drawing primitives to reconstruct the
         | desktop on the other end. That is obviously a much more
         | complicated thing to get working and is better for different
         | use cases.
        
       | saghul wrote:
       | Hey all, saghul from team Jitsi here. Didn't expect this to
       | spread so fast, thanks everyone!
       | 
       | Happy to answer any questions you may have!
        
         | nikisweeting wrote:
         | We host music events where ~500-2000 people watch a shared
         | stream, and some subset of those people break off into video
         | chat rooms to hang out with each other.
         | 
         | We'd love to pay for JaaS to host the video room portion of
         | events, however the MAU pricing model doesn't work well for
         | events that only last a day or two. Is there any alternative
         | pricing model that charges by the day or minute?
        
         | darkteflon wrote:
         | Hi saghul, thanks for dropping by.
         | 
         | We're currently running self-hosted Jitsi Meet in production
         | and have been very happy with performance - particularly
         | stability. We would however be interested in switching to JaaS
         | as we'd like to get away from managing our own infra and just
         | host a landing page through, e.g., NextJS on Vercel, with a
         | JaaS iFrame.
         | 
         | The landing page mentions deep customisation but when clicking
         | through to the documentation I see only custom branding, etc.,
         | through the developer web console. We have some customisations
         | on the front-end (custom kick messages, auto-enabling lobbies,
         | etc). Is it possible to make these sorts of customisations to
         | JaaS? It seems like an iFrame is the recommended integration so
         | would be great to get a sense if any of these things are
         | possible. Could you speak generally to the degree of
         | customisation possible outside of the developer web console?
         | 
         | Thanks in advance.
        
           | saghul wrote:
           | > We would however be interested in switching to JaaS as we'd
           | like to get away from managing our own infra and just host a
           | landing page through, e.g., NextJS on Vercel, with a JaaS
           | iFrame.
           | 
           | This is indeed what we had in mind when building JaaS.
           | 
           | > We have some customisations on the front-end (custom kick
           | messages, auto-enabling lobbies, etc). Is it possible to make
           | these sorts of customisations to JaaS?
           | 
           | Depends on exactly what. As we just launched we are learning
           | what our customers want and adding new APIs and more
           | customization options pretty rapidly. Please get in touch and
           | let's discuss what APIs / customizations you'd need.
           | 
           | > Could you speak generally to the degree of customisation
           | possible outside of the developer web console?
           | 
           | As you mentioned before, the iframe API is indeed the
           | recommended way for integrating.
        
         | trestenhortz wrote:
         | Are you concerned amazon will take your business?
        
           | saghul wrote:
           | No. They have a similar offering of their own. We also run
           | our infra on AWS so they are getting business from us
           | already.
        
       | telesilla wrote:
       | One of the great things about Jitsi are the config options:
       | 
       | https://meet.jit.si/JitsiMeetAPIExampletest#config.p2p.enabl...
       | 
       | Should give you stereo, high-quality audio suitable for music,
       | with echo cancellation disabled.
       | 
       | One of the things that makes Jitsi not perfect however is that I
       | understand that Jitsi Videobridge is an SFU, thus not appropriate
       | for a large conference. Perhaps now they have a way to monetise,
       | they can add this and charge for bandwidth/CPU usage.
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | > One of the things that makes Jitsi not perfect however is
         | that I understand that Jitsi Videobridge is an SFU, thus not
         | appropriate for a large conference.
         | 
         | On the contrary, this is how you can scale up to large
         | conferences. We do bridge cascading, you can read more about it
         | here: https://jitsi.org/blog/jitsi-meet-now-with-geographical-
         | brid...
         | 
         | We are now working on very large conferences, expect some news
         | soon :-)
        
       | gregoriol wrote:
       | Would it work with lib-jitsi-meet?
       | 
       | In other words, would you jitsi be able to take care of the
       | hosting while we develop a custom interface with the lib?
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | Yes! You are welcome to build your own UI with lib-jitsi-meet.
        
       | css wrote:
       | What is the screen sharing performance of this like? When I tried
       | to set up the Jitsi integration for Mattermost earlier this week,
       | even with only 3 people in a call, we could not get the stream
       | over 1-2 fps. Discord handles native-res 60fps streaming.
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | When running from a browser, Chrome specially lowers the
         | framerate and prefers higher resolution. Not sure we can tune
         | it for high fps.
        
       | cudder wrote:
       | > Free for up to 25 monthly active users
       | 
       | This is the only mention of pricing that I can find on your site
       | unless I sign up. I wonder what the cost is for >25 MAU.
        
         | argument_clinic wrote:
         | BTW, having to sign up just to see the price is a big no-no for
         | me and I'd probably not sign up just to see it.
        
         | turbinerneiter wrote:
         | https://imgur.com/a/uf1mTxy
         | 
         | 99$/month for 300 MAU
        
           | arcturus17 wrote:
           | Video is crazy expensive.
           | 
           | I know the underlying infra is complex, but these costs mean
           | you would need a lot of capital and a very aggressive
           | monetization strategy from the get-go to even get started,
           | no?
        
             | turbinerneiter wrote:
             | In my mind I'm comparing this to Teams/Slack/Zoom and so on
             | - in that context it is cheap, no?
             | 
             | Not sure if this is the right context tough.
        
               | arcturus17 wrote:
               | No, you're right.
               | 
               | I was thinking in terms of B2C economics... $99 for 300
               | MAU would be crazy for a consumer startup product. $99
               | for 300 internal business users is completely different.
        
       | worble wrote:
       | Looking for pricing, I get to this page:
       | https://www.8x8.com/products/apis/video
       | 
       | >We're charging on a Monthly Active User (MAU)
       | 
       | >Pricing starts at $0.35/MAU and decreases based on volume.
       | 
       | >An MAU is defined as a unique user who attended at least one
       | meeting, with at least one other user, in the same month. To
       | determine a unique user, we store an identifier on the device's
       | local storage, and that will remain the same as long as the user
       | uses the same browser and same device and doesn't clear their
       | local cache data. Mobile is similar. An identifier remains across
       | updates and gets removed if you delete the app.
       | 
       | So does that mean that if they are running Cookie AutoDelete or
       | Temporary Containers addons, or simply clear all their browser
       | data after exiting, any single user could easily eat all your
       | user limit if they just repeatedly connected to the service? Or,
       | even just having a single person connect on their desktop, laptop
       | and phone once would eat 3 of your licenses?
        
         | kwindla wrote:
         | Pricing for real-time video is hard. There are pretty large
         | variable costs to run a service like this.
         | 
         | WebRTC is peer-to-peer, architecturally. But if you run the
         | service you pay for bandwidth for users behind firewalls
         | (because you need to forward the audio/video through TURN
         | servers) and for calls with more than 3 or 4 people (because
         | you need to offload some of the cpu/bandwidth from the
         | clients).
         | 
         | Bandwidth and media server CPU set the floor for what you need
         | to charge.
         | 
         | As a SaaS, you can charge per <usage> or charge per <user>.
         | Each pricing model is good for a different subset of your
         | customers. With fairly large variable costs, usage-based
         | pricing is easier to model for you, but not necessarily for
         | your customers.
         | 
         | For example, your (developer) customers that charge a flat rate
         | per "seat" per month for their products will have trouble
         | projecting what their margin will be if you charge them per
         | video minute.
         | 
         | The industry Jitsi/8x8 competes in is gradually moving towards
         | $0.0015/minute as the rough cost of video for customers with
         | significant volume. So one way to look at Jitsi's pricing model
         | is that they are projecting an average of ~4 hours of video per
         | month per unique user. ($0.35 / $0.0015 / 60). Which seems ...
         | low?
         | 
         | This is separate from the question above about how they track
         | unique users, which I agree is really interesting!
         | 
         | Also, and again separately from Jitsi, there's also a long
         | history of not-so-transparent pricing in the telecommunications
         | world. One of the major SaaS video platforms advertises peer-
         | to-peer calls as free on their service. And they are, if you
         | don't count the TURN bandwidth they bill you for.
         | 
         | (Disclaimer: as the cofounder of Daily.co, a YC company that
         | competes with this Jitsi service, I think about variable vs
         | per-user pricing way too much. tldr; we can almost always do
         | better for you than any of our competitors, partly because
         | we're happy to talk to you and put together custom pricing
         | based on your use case. But it's also true that most of our
         | customers, especially our largest customers, don't select us
         | primarily based on price. Empirically, we win on ease of use,
         | video quality, API flexibility, and developer support. So
         | under-pricing isn't an optimal business strategy, either.)
        
           | ourcat wrote:
           | I'd never heard of Daily.co before. Looks great! Nice work.
           | 
           | I'm about to start building out an idea I've had based on
           | WebRTC/MediaSoup/nginx-RTMP and ffmpeg. (But not for 'live'
           | video calls though).
           | 
           | And having just seen your Jobs page, I think I might drop you
           | guys a line, once I've got something working. ;)
        
           | Bswift wrote:
           | Just wanted to say that daily.co was crucial to my company
           | during the early months of the lockdown. We had a fully
           | integrated telehealth option deployed for our users in a
           | weekend. You all are amazing!
        
           | jefftk wrote:
           | I'm currently using Twilio for echo.jefftk.com, and paying
           | $0.004/minute (I'm very low volume).
           | 
           | I was considering switching to this, but their pricing is a
           | terrible fit for my "most calls have mostly people who've
           | never used it before" situation.
        
             | sudosysgen wrote:
             | There are other JaaS providers that might have better
             | pricing for you
        
         | philipps wrote:
         | I would still like to see an answer to the questions above. In
         | particular, does a user who connects on three devices count as
         | three MAUs?
        
           | Spare_account wrote:
           | If MAUs is hard, then don't use MAU as a billing metric?
           | Charge for concurrent connections or by the minute maybe?
        
           | avianlyric wrote:
           | Sounds like it. But at 35cents / month, that doesn't sound
           | like a bad outcome.
        
         | owens99 wrote:
         | That's way too expensive. My $80/month server bill can support
         | millions of users per month but would only get me <300 MAUs on
         | this service?
         | 
         | Edit: my guess is I misunderstood who they are targeting with
         | this. Thought they were targeting developers who want to
         | integrate Jitsi with an existing product.
        
           | jrh206 wrote:
           | Personally, I feel like this is really generous pricing
           | 
           | Compare it to, e.g. Slack
           | (https://app.slack.com/plans/T01JN93179R?geocode=en-gb) or
           | Zoom (https://zoom.us/pricing)
           | 
           | Notwithstanding any accounting issues raised by worble, which
           | I'm sure will be ironed out over time
        
             | glaive123 wrote:
             | They must be targeting people who just want to use this for
             | internal purposes, rather than developers who want to
             | integrate Jitsi with an existing product.
        
               | emcho wrote:
               | (Jitsi Dev here) Most of our customers are actually
               | developers and that's how the service is intended. Hope
               | this helps
        
               | jrh206 wrote:
               | Yes, exactly. This offering is a Zoom alternative
        
             | eznzt wrote:
             | This is like people saying fastmail pricing is reasonable
             | because other providers gyp you too.
        
               | mstade wrote:
               | I don't get it, what's wrong with fastmail's pricing?
               | I've been a customer for years and never thought much
               | about it.
        
               | JacobSuperslav wrote:
               | it isn't? i used it for years and been very happy.
        
               | eznzt wrote:
               | The marginal cost of the service they provide is like 10%
               | of what they charge, or even less.
        
               | vharuck wrote:
               | If you believe this, start a competing service. There is
               | no moral or practical rule that forces prices down to
               | cost without external reason. If Fastmail is making big
               | bucks, and customers are happy with the price, that's
               | good for everyone.
        
               | tomashubelbauer wrote:
               | Do you go to restaurants expecting to pay only the total
               | cost of ingredients for your meal? Fastmail provides an
               | excellent service and if anything I feel as though I
               | underpay for what I'm getting. I'm happy to know they
               | have a healthy margin to pay their developers from and
               | improve the product.
        
               | eznzt wrote:
               | I expect to pay a reasonable price. Being overcharged by
               | 90% is not reasonable.
        
               | marcinzm wrote:
               | Restaurants charge 4-5x the cost of ingredients. So I
               | take it you never eat out?
        
               | eznzt wrote:
               | I have worked in one and no they don't. Most restaurants
               | barely break even by the end of the month once you factor
               | in all costs (like employees, rent...), which I did in
               | the example of fastmail.
        
               | marcinzm wrote:
               | You said marginal cost which is not all costs. Marginal
               | cost is equivalent to ingredients and does not include
               | fixed costs which likely make up the majority fo their
               | expenses.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | cryptonym wrote:
           | Not the best comparison. Probably depends on your use-case.
           | 
           | How much does it cost to setup and maintain the platform
           | (actually reachable from end users) 24/24 at 99.99 ? Global
           | infra ? Dealing with HIPAA/GDPR ?
        
           | saghul wrote:
           | Millions of users per month doing video conferencing?
        
             | jamespo wrote:
             | Of course not
        
             | owens99 wrote:
             | No. I meant for a normal SPA or CRUD app without video.
        
               | saghul wrote:
               | Then what are you trying to compare? The pricing includes
               | all video traffic relaying, which is the non-trivial part
               | of these types of setups.
        
         | emcho wrote:
         | (Jitsi Dev here) Yes you are correct. Cookie delete is indeed
         | something that would trigger a new user count. So far we
         | haven't seen this happen but if you believe your users would be
         | massively cleaning cookies, we are happy to have a conversation
         | and find a work around for you.
        
           | sandGorgon wrote:
           | Do consider pricing on the peak number of simultaneous
           | streams (like Pusher.com does)
        
           | Stephen304 wrote:
           | FWIW, me and my team would likely be super into paying for a
           | hosted Jitsi if there was another pricing structure. We run
           | our own but keeping it running smoothly takes away dev
           | energy. Counting usage like this just seems very ripe for
           | abuse by anybody who wishes to harm the group.
        
         | thedracle wrote:
         | Jitsi is open source, so you can look at the exact mechanics of
         | their billing counter to answer your question:
         | 
         | It's all orchestrated from here:
         | https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/react/featur...
         | 
         | Which generates the MAU ID via:
         | 
         | react/features/billing-counter/functions.js:80
         | 
         | /* * Returns the stored billing id (or generates a new one if
         | none is present). * * @returns {string} */
         | 
         | export function getBillingId() {                   let
         | billingId = jitsiLocalStorage.getItem(BILLING_ID);
         | if (!billingId) {             billingId = uuid.v4();
         | jitsiLocalStorage.setItem(BILLING_ID, billingId);         }
         | return billingId;     }
        
       | TYPE_FASTER wrote:
       | I really like Jitsi. I've been running it on a Digital Ocean
       | droplet for my own use.
       | 
       | The one feature I've been missing is remote control during a
       | screen sharing session. I understand it was removed for security
       | reasons (https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-
       | electron/issues/431). Are there any plans to implement the
       | feature again in the future?
       | 
       | Thanks!
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | Yes, it will come back. We have so many things in our plate
         | that not everything can be acted upon in a timely manner. Don't
         | despair :-)
        
           | TYPE_FASTER wrote:
           | Awesome, thanks for the reply.
        
           | pqdbr wrote:
           | Great news!
        
       | gardnr wrote:
       | Is it still owned by atlassian?
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | Nope, we're part of the 8x8 happy family now.
        
         | luto wrote:
         | they sold it in 2018.
         | 
         | https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/atlassian-sells-jitsi-an-o...
        
       | acatsdream wrote:
       | Will there be a flutter sdk?
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | We have no plans for it at this point. We provide native SDKs
         | for Android and iOS and IIRC there is already a 3rd party
         | Flutter module which exposes our native SDKs to Flutter.
        
       | petters wrote:
       | Seems much more expensive than e.g. OpenTok. Aren't they similar?
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | The pricing models are vastly different AFAIK. How are you
         | comparing them?
        
       | fiatjaf wrote:
       | I tried to run a Jitsi server. It's a madness full of Docker
       | impossible things to run and a very long and confusing
       | configuration file.
       | 
       | I wonder why can't these things be provided as binaries with a
       | simple set of settings.
       | 
       | Now they offer Jitsi as a service for free up to 25 users? That's
       | great though. It should cover 99% of normal people use cases, so
       | no one will use meet.jit.si anymore.
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | > I tried to run a Jitsi server. It's a madness full of Docker
         | impossible things to run and a very long and confusing
         | configuration file.
         | 
         | Sorry to hear that. Any chance you can provide some more
         | details on what you tried and didn't work? I'd like to improve
         | on this.
         | 
         | > I wonder why can't these things be provided as binaries with
         | a simple set of settings.
         | 
         | That's kind of what they already are, but at certain degree of
         | complexity it unfortunately leaks back to the user.
        
         | nikisweeting wrote:
         | I don't know about others but I much prefer running a docker
         | container than a random binary.
        
         | theandrewbailey wrote:
         | I set up a Jitsi instance last year, and it didn't involve
         | Docker at all. Getting the ports set up was the biggest issue.
         | 
         | I used this guide:
         | https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...
        
         | buovjaga wrote:
         | Over at The Document Foundation, we use a Salt setup with no
         | Docker:
         | https://git.libreoffice.org/infra/salt/+/refs/heads/master/j...
        
       | kitkat_new wrote:
       | when will E2EE get out of Beta?
        
       | svarlamov wrote:
       | Congrats this seems like a very needed product! We tried Jitsi
       | for our web app (1), but ultimately settled on Daily.co for it's
       | pricing and easy developer experience. How does JaaS stability
       | compare to Jitsi? Any one here chose Jitsi over Daily?
       | 
       | 1. https://codingrooms.com/
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | > ultimately settled on Daily.co for it's pricing and easy
         | developer experience.
         | 
         | I can't comment on pricing, but would you mind elaborating on
         | the DX part?
         | 
         | > How does JaaS stability compare to Jitsi?
         | 
         | They are the same. JaaS is a different deployment from
         | meet.jit.si, using the same tech.
        
         | riedel wrote:
         | This is great since selfhosted jitsi somehow developed into an
         | IT support nightmare for us. Would be awesome to hear how they
         | are doing the scaling. Our IT only offers jitsi only for max 10
         | ppl in a room which keeps us from using it at least in 50% of
         | the cases. Also some users are reporting problems, so it would
         | really be great to see a supported desktop app for all relevant
         | platforms for those that struggle to get the browser setup
         | right. Also native performance background effects has become
         | something that at least could support bits of privacy in this
         | crazy home office world ( it is not always e2ee that makes the
         | difference).
        
           | saghul wrote:
           | > Would be awesome to hear how they are doing the scaling.
           | 
           | Shameless plug:
           | https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/jitsi_scaling/
           | 
           | > so it would really be great to see a supported desktop app
           | for all relevant platforms
           | 
           | We have an Electron based app:
           | https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron
           | 
           | > Also native performance background effects
           | 
           | This is in the works, we have to be able to share some news
           | soon!
        
           | anticensor wrote:
           | BigBlueButton is more suitable for larger conferences.
        
             | svarlamov wrote:
             | Oddly enough, we also used BigBlueButton for a while and
             | really loved the additional features like the whiteboard
             | but also had to drop it because we were doing more support
             | for BBB than our core product...
        
       | pojntfx wrote:
       | Awesome! Chose Jitsi a while back for my old high school's COVID
       | chat system and it's been working flawlessly.
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | Glad to hear this! <3
        
       | d0100 wrote:
       | Jitsi is great and we've been using it for some time.
       | 
       | We switched from a custom WebRTC because error handling becomes
       | too complex with browser permissions and connection.
       | 
       | It does work much better, however there are still a few times
       | that video just doesn't work, with no way to debug why
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | Would love to hear more about those problems. Have you opened
         | GH issues / community posts?
        
       | mike_d wrote:
       | Now that they have commercialized the project, I suspect a
       | rebranding away from "Meet" is probably coming next. It is
       | obviously confusingly similar to Google Meet.
        
         | lozf wrote:
         | Jitsi were using "meet" years before google, way back when
         | Hangouts was still newish and quite good.
        
         | amenod wrote:
         | Well, they can also just wait for Google to either rename or
         | kill off their product. /s
         | 
         | On a more serious note, it was never confusing to me - I didn't
         | even notice they share the same word until now tbh. And quick
         | search for "meet videoconferencing" shows quite a few of the
         | products named similarly. To me it is almost as generic as
         | "chat".
        
       | peterburkimsher wrote:
       | I host the Asia-Pacific weekly meetup for BeWelcome every
       | Thursday night, starting in about an hour (23:00 NZDT, 18:00
       | UTC+8)
       | 
       | https://meet.jit.si/BeWelcome-Chat_4MembersVolunteers
       | 
       | BeWelcome is like CouchSurfing, but free and open-source. The
       | leaders therefore chose to support other OSS where possible,
       | including Jitsi. Less than 25 people attend regularly, but
       | hopefully it can grow (not many people travelling these days,
       | it's nice to hear first-hand about life in Singapore, China,
       | Korea, Germany, Italy). If we have Jitsi-related issues, I'll try
       | to let you know! And you're all welcome to drop in and find out
       | more :)
        
         | zelphirkalt wrote:
         | It is probably offtopic here and therefore you are downvoted by
         | other people, but personally I thank you for getting the word
         | out there. Hope to join a meeting soon!
        
       | johnxie wrote:
       | Taskade's video chat runs on Jitsi, on the same page with our
       | collaborative task list. We're happy with the performance and
       | integration so far.
       | 
       | You can test out our implementation no signup needed:
       | https://www.taskade.com/new
        
       | kabes wrote:
       | If I understand correctly this is for jitsi meet. Is a hosted
       | version of the jitsi SFU standalone also planned?
        
         | saghul wrote:
         | Hey there! Jitsi dev here. What do you have in mind? Feel free
         | to contact us at: jaastech@8x8.com
        
           | kabes wrote:
           | Something with an API similar to Vonage/Tokbox or Twilio
           | video.
        
             | saghul wrote:
             | Gotcha. We are thinking about that. Please reach out to us
             | and let's talk about it: jaastech@8x8.com
        
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