[HN Gopher] Show HN: Zoom / Teams Open Source alternative for on...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Zoom / Teams Open Source alternative for online learning
Author : fmeringdal
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-06-08 12:31 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| denysvitali wrote:
| Friendly reminder that if you still can't afford (as in, it's not
| your call to make) to migrate away from Teams, at least you can
| ease the pain a little bit, or contribute to ease it:
|
| https://github.com/fossteams/teams-cli
| pryelluw wrote:
| Wishing the project had an active roadmap.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Well, I'm randomly working on it, but the roadmap (at least
| to get to a stable version) is kind of obvious. The core
| features of Teams must be replicated, so that the original
| application should be only used for calls.
|
| Do you have any suggestion?
| sodality2 wrote:
| This is so cool. Sending this to my school district, some of whom
| decided the best way to teach was to open webcamtests.com and
| share the screen, instead of just using the camera within MS
| Teams.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| Woow, that's really cool. Thanks for sharing the project :)
| ianbooker wrote:
| Looks good. But does it scale?
|
| And Firefox is not supported?
| mordae wrote:
| Why is this downvoted?
|
| Anyway, this open source alternative doesn't work with the open
| source browser and suggests to install two proprietary ones
| instead.
| pmontra wrote:
| Yep, I wonder what are the technical reasons not to support
| Firefox. Some missing codec as (maybe) for the lack of support
| in FaceTime web?
| kwindla wrote:
| Firefox WebRTC support isn't missing anything big, but it's
| missing a lot of little things from the 1.0 spec that Chrome
| (and, increasingly, Safari) have. But, much worse from a
| support perspective, recent Firefox releases have been fairly
| likely to have WebRTC-related breaking changes and
| regressions.
|
| We all _try_ to support Firefox. But given the relative usage
| numbers of Firefox, Chrome /Chromium/Electron/Edgium, and
| Safari, it's sometimes hard to devote resources to testing
| and workarounds.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| It is not horizontally scalable right now, but that is not hard
| to implement either. You can have a look at the dogehouse
| project: https://github.com/benawad/dogehouse if you want to
| see how to horizontally scale mediasoup which is the media
| handler and stateful process within the servers.
|
| I think vertical scaling will be more than enough for most of
| the users that are going to self-host this.
| lhoff wrote:
| What would you say is the maximum of users in a single
| session if everyone has Video sharing activated.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| > And Firefox is not supported?
|
| Sorry about that! I had actually commented out firefox support
| in the frontend, but I pushed a new updated now that
| uncommented it.
|
| Firefox is supported
| blueblob wrote:
| Maybe the demo server needs to be restarted, because it still
| does not work.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| I forgot to update the demo :) Now it works
| mfkp wrote:
| You should consider allowing Edge browser as well (since
| it's based on Chromium anyway, I imagine it should work
| fine).
| fmeringdal wrote:
| I thought Edge was supported but I havent tested it. This
| is a list of the browsers that are supported:
| https://github.com/fmeringdal/nettu-
| meet/blob/main/frontend/....
|
| Are you running an old version of edge? If not, do you
| mind filing a issue in the repository?
| mfkp wrote:
| Ah, that must be the issue. I'm using Edge on Linux (I
| know, it's weird).
|
| I'll go ahead and file an issue for it now :-)
| marsouin wrote:
| I was wondering the same thing. How scalable is it? Any
| recommendations for deployment/production use?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Unfortunately when connecting from Firefox I get the following
| message: "This browser is not supported, please use the most
| recent version of Chrome or Safari."
|
| Is there any serious reason for this kind of omission in an open
| source project?
| fmeringdal wrote:
| Sorry about that! I had actually commented out firefox support
| in the frontend, but I pushed a new updated now that
| uncommented it.
|
| Firefox is supported
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| That's great news, thank you!
| krastanov wrote:
| Any plans to support pressure sensitivity in drawings? The
| difference in the quality of the handwriting is drastic and I
| avoid teaching with whiteboard tools that do not react to
| different stylus pressure.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| That is definitely one of the most important features on the
| roadmap. It is indeed quite difficult to draw with a mouse.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Very cool!
|
| A speech therapist friend of mine recently lamented about the
| lack of good solutions for online therapy in this space, and this
| seems to check most of the marks. Two feature additions would
| make this viable and also very valuable for her use case:
|
| - Ability to save/load different whiteboards (with multiple
| slides) as templates, to prepare material for the patients to
| fill out/work with. There might be hundreds of slides needed for
| one session, so setting it time and again would not be an option.
|
| - Ability to export all (filled out) slides as jpgs or a single
| file pdf at once
|
| Definitely keeping an eye on this one.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| I am definitely going to work hard on this project. I would
| love to hear more about what usecases you think might be
| missing, dont hesitate to add feature requests as issues in the
| repository on github when you think of something else.
| clcaev wrote:
| How does Nettu compare to https://bigbluebutton.org/, which is
| more directly in the educational space?
|
| I notice Nettu has a built-in graphing calculator, and BBB
| doesn't.
|
| Will you also be offering a turn-key service? I use BBB though
| https://meet.coop.
|
| Having more open source options with corresponding hosting
| services would be great.
| marsouin wrote:
| Big Blue Button is bloated and poorly maintained, has old
| documentation and is pretty heavy to host and use.
| svarlamov wrote:
| This is (very unfortunately) true, and I honestly don't know
| people get it to work in larger school implementations. The
| idea behind BigBlueButton is spot on and ultimately I hope
| another FOSS tool can help to fill this void
| mordae wrote:
| Unlike Jitsi it also automatically throttles FPS, provides
| shared note-taking, moderation tools and recording.
| kenniskrag wrote:
| and saves every session for some weeks on the server by
| default. Even when not recorded.
|
| https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/9202
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Perhaps you can say this already, but please make sure you have
| some moderation capabilities. As a teacher, there are occasional
| jokesters/pranksters to take negative advantage of screen
| sharing, chat, etc.
|
| The Google (new) meeting moderation abilities are a good starting
| point.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| There is certainly some features missing before it can be a
| production ready classroom tool with 25+ students, in
| particular having different roles and policies for the
| participants. Luckily that is something that I am going to
| focus on implementing next.
| svarlamov wrote:
| This is a really brilliant project, and I love that it's open
| source! I'm certain that for tutoring, this is a much-needed
| self-hosting option! When it comes to schools, I'd be curious to
| know how it works in practice. Having supported a lot of schools
| in the past year using Coding Rooms with integrated Daily.co for
| remote learning, I have to say that the biggest challenges have
| always been related to just getting video to "work" with
| students. From the instructor's perspective, it's just so
| challenging to get 30 K-12 students on the same page with audio,
| video, input devices, and UIs -- not to mention stuff like just
| getting everyone signed in or using the right link. A system
| (perhaps hardware-included/based) that could do that would be
| ground-breaking for remote learning in my opinion. This is also
| the reason, in addition to school policies in some cases, that
| instructors feel like they have to stick with what they know in
| situations like this.
| svarlamov wrote:
| It's also worth noting that we started by integrating Jitsi,
| then BigBlueButton, and finally settled with Daily.co because
| stability, UIs, and support were such huge issues for us with
| the other solutions. While Daily.co doesn't do everything
| perfectly, I have to say their coverage of edge cases and
| support has been a lifesaver scaling our product for schools.
| kwindla wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words. Our goal is to asymptotically
| approach doing everything perfectly, and we really value
| feedback. So please let us know where we can improve and what
| you'd like us to add. Relatedly, sometimes we have sample
| code for features that aren't nicely abstracted into APIs, or
| which we haven't documented yet/well. So don't hesitate to
| ping us.
| svarlamov wrote:
| I can certainly vouch for you and your team's commitment to
| that level of perfection and use of feedback even during
| what I can only imagine was a truly unprecedented year of
| usage. The majority of our (relatively few) issues were
| small UI issues that confused students and instructors, but
| with the new beta of the pre-built UI I believe those have
| been addressed! Some of those less well documented patches
| have also been really useful in tuning performance for
| certain use cases!
| d0100 wrote:
| Daily.co looks easier to use than Jitsi, however I can't
| justify paying based on minutes when there is no "real"
| resource consumed
| pgo wrote:
| Yeah there is, the video chat is not P2P, everyone uses the
| SFU model where all your media goes through daily's server,
| so they have to pay for the instances and the bandwidth
| kichimi wrote:
| Also Jitsi is a good alternative.
| fmeringdal wrote:
| Jitsi is great. But Jitsi doesnt have a shared whiteboard (with
| graphing calculators etc) yet which I think is Nettu Meet's
| main strength when doing online learning
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-08 23:02 UTC)