I have tried various open source video conferencing apps. Actually, as it happens my first introduction to open source was through streaming back in the day. Since WebRTC came on the scene I have been excited by the possibility of open source web-based video conferencing. However, the promise seemed to take a while to deliver. I tried many products, the most sophisticated and promising being, for a while, BigBlueButton. But BBB, and other softwares, just seemed so clunky and hard to install, ugly UI etc. We installed and ran BBB for Coko but no one really wants to use it and we had bandwidth issues etc. Sorry to say it, but open source has been lagging behind the closed source world with regard to video conferencing.
I have been keeping my eye on Jitsi for some time. It looks pretty good. But I was caught up with my legacy understanding of such systems and it took a while, also, for Jitsi to evolve. I tried out their demo for a few meetings but it had some lag issues. Of course, trying out a demo ‘for real’ is a bit dumb and I should not have expected anything like you want in a real world production environment. But… I was a little deterred. I also assumed it would be hard to install.
Finally, this weekend I thought I would give it a go…so I started up a digitalocean droplet (a server) – which costs $20 a month and took about 2 mins to get going. I then followed these instructions – https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick-install.md. I had a Ubuntu install at digitalocean so followed those steps. But I expected complications…the install mentions it relies on jitsei-videobridge and I thought… I bet this doesn’t work…I’ll have to install some mad java app or something…What do you know…within 5 mins I had a working version of Jitsi-meet! amazing! The process worked as described, basically 3 commands and it was running.
If it works for Coko it is also very interesting because Jitsi on the front end is all JavaScript and there seem to be some react components…which means we could integrate into xpub/editoria (publishing systems) etc…
We will try it out in the next weeks. Expect more info soon!
Hi, Adam!
Nice manuals on nice jitsi-meet software. Thank you. Do you address authentication problem? Especially on mobile clients. There is no authentication at all as I see. I’m trying to setup ssl client auth.
hi, I dont look at auth… but if you find anything out please let me know!
Hi Adam,
I have been excited by the possibility of open source web-based video conferencing too. jitsi-meet software is really good?
It is GREAT!
Thanks for sharing!
No problem…we use Jitsi all the time… seems very good over low bandwidth connections and with large groups…i find it much more reliable and better quality than something like google hangouts… i *highly* recommend it…also, if you have some dev resources you can integrate it pretty nicely….
What kind of bandwidth use do you get for a typical meeting?
I dont know…never measured it…maybe some that reads this may be able to comment
What about OpenMeeting from Apache?
Your this post is old, I don’t know have you get chance to try the BigBlueButton based Mconf because it is much better than that.
We installed BBB and spent a long time with it before changing to Jitsi. I support BBB but I found the interface very old school and clunky and the system is extremely hard to customise.
Hi Adam,
I was searching on open source conference tools and came across this page.
How’s your experience with Jitsi been so far. Last post was 2 years back so wondering how’s it now.
I am planning to use Jitsi or if there is something better which is stable and easy to customize. Thanks
Sorry for slow response. Its going well though we now just use the publicall available jitsi. saves maintenance