
Jitsi Meet features update - jrepinc
https://jitsi.org/news/features-update-april-2020/
======
tasty_freeze
Over the past three weeks I've tried a few different conferencing solutions,
including jitsi. I'll give it another try with this update.

My use case is I take weekly music lessons, and now they are virtual. The
problem is the DSP done on audio was designed for speech. If my teacher is
explaining something then plays an example on his bass, it usually sounds
terrible, maybe even inaudible.

I send him pre-recorded mp3s of cover songs; ideally he could listen to it and
I could comment in real time about places where things could be improved.
Instead, if he is playing any music on his system, I hear nothing -- no music,
no talk. It seems like the software thinks "Hey, this participant is listening
to non-conference audio, so I'll just mute him (at least on skype). I'd love
there to be a half duplex audio button so none of the DSP shenanigans are
needed, and a high quality audio stream would be sent.

~~~
saghul
We don't have a way to turn these on from the UI, but here is how you can
disable all audio processing:

[https://meet.jit.si/YourRoonNameHere#config.disableAP=true](https://meet.jit.si/YourRoonNameHere#config.disableAP=true)

~~~
vitro
We hold regular flute meetings and play together. In this quarantine time we
wanted to meet online, but if we play all at once, it seems I cannot hear
everyone else at the same time. I guess it is as if everyone was shouting over
everyone else, which is not the case when you have a meeting where usually
only one person speaks at a time

Will this also fix this issue? So everyone will be able to hear everyone?

~~~
gnud
You won't be able to play together because of latency.

You will think you are in time with someone, but you will react when you
hear/see them on your screen, which is maybe .15 seconds after they actually
made the sound/movement. And then they will hear/see your reaction .15 seconds
later again.

~~~
tpolzer
If all participants have good internet and are geographically close it should
theoretically be possible to have delay not much greater than rtt/2 for
everybody.

With rtt < 20ms that should make musical performances possible. After all,
sound only travels less than four meters in 10ms. So this is just like singing
in a choir (with more visual delay - but that can be solved by having a
conductor).

Unfortunately I'm not aware of any software making that a practical reality,
even with ftth.

~~~
lachenmayer
You're assuming that network latency is the only latency that's involved here,
but a huge latency source is the audio codec. Opus adds ~20ms latency, and
that's the most low latency codec that's widely supported at the moment. You
can see a comparison here: [https://www.opus-
codec.org/comparison/](https://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/)

There are all sorts of other latency that need to be taken into consideration
too, and unfortunately in practice those do add up to live music being
unplayable on pretty much any network.

There's a really interesting project called NINJAM
[https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/](https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/) which is
designed for live music jam sessions. It flips this fundamental constraint on
its head - instead of being real-time, it streams everyone else's output
delayed by one bar (theoretically any interval >RTT I guess?). I haven't tried
it, but it's a really cool idea.

~~~
tpolzer
Just because 20ms is the default doesn't mean that it has to be that way. The
chart you linked shows a big "bubble" for opus for a reason.

Opus minimum frame size is actually 2.5ms:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716#section-2.1.4](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716#section-2.1.4)

Of course there's a ton of other potential sources of delay that make my
fantasy hard to achieve, probably already starting at the typical USB
microphones (in headsets/cameras).

~~~
namibj
20ms rtt through e.g. opus on a loopback network interface is already
decidedly non-trivial to archive with "normal" hardware. When you do have low-
latency devices, it becomes easy, but not everyone has those.

USB should not really be an issue here, however.

------
CrankyBear
I want to like Jitsi, but I can't. I've been testing it out on a variety of
servers, bare-metal and cloud with Debian and CentOS. Regardless of platform,
it doesn't scale, it eats memory like peanuts, and can saturate even 10GbE
network connections. The service, as opposed to the server, clearly works
well. But, the service doesn't have anything like the load that Zoom, Teams,
Hangouts, etc. must deal with.

~~~
_-___________-_
I've been helping quite a few people set up Jitsi lately. The software works
reasonably well, although documentation is lacking and a lot of configuration
options are named terribly, but one thing I've noticed is people's
expectations about bandwidth usage are way lower than actuality, especially
outbound from the server. But a bit of napkin math suggests that Jitsi isn't
doing anything fundamentally inefficient here; one high-res stream plus N low-
res streams transmitted to N participants is just a _lot_ of bandwidth.

~~~
nemoniac
Please tell us what the config options should be.

~~~
_-___________-_
Config options for what?

~~~
BrowserMeeting
lol. Seriously, for what?

------
reader_1000
When I tried Jitsi with my family friends, some of them struggled to use it
since they don't know English. So I think changing the language can be easier
for nonspeakers of English.

For example, language select box can be placed next to "Go" button (when
creating meeting) and next to info button in the meeting. Also using "Accept-
Language" HTTP header for choosing the language can be a good default. Another
option is to add a language query parameter to the URL so that host can easily
share meeting with a particular language.

Also if it would be great if some improvements can be made for low bandwitdh
since there are people with slow connections and limited data plans. (On the
other hand, there is already an option to lower video quality).

Other than that, kudos to Jitsi team for their great efforts and this great
project.

~~~
ehsankia
The very last item in the blog post says

> Updated translations

So it seems like they've been working on this.

~~~
reader_1000
I think that work is for improving quality and quantity of translations which
is also good.

------
bArray
I've trialed several video conferencing apps in the last few weeks (Skype,
Zoom, Hangouts and others), Jitsi Meet is the only one I've been able to have
a video call on with my low-bandwidth, high-ping network. They've done a
superb job for my use-case, I'm very happy with the result.

------
sandGorgon
i just hope WebRTC Insertable Streams spec matures 10x faster now -
[https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6321945865879552)
. True end-to-end video conferencin privacy through the browser!

This is the time when its truly needed. Firefox, Chrome and Edge should just
sit in a room and not come out till its done.

~~~
kodablah
I see nothing in the specification that specifically mentions encryption. Are
there any concerns about performance of in-JS streaming encryption? Does the
encoder/decoder take promises and are they expected to use the subtle crypto
APIs in the browser which return promises?

~~~
capableweb
No, because the specification is more general than that. The specification is
about being able to add a input/output transform step, so you can add
encryption on top of WebRTC streams, via this new API.

JavaScript encryption/decryption seems to work fine for the most basic use
cases, but if you have many streams you need to do encryption/decryption for
you, you probably want to use native browser APIs for it or WebAssembly.

~~~
kodablah
Right, I understand it's more general, but there is a use cases section in the
explainer that putting this there might have value.

In other cases where encryption is used (e.g. fetch, webrtc itself, etc),
often we ask the browser to do it due to, among other things, the performance
benefit of not doing it in JS or WASM. I'd have to test using
window.crypto.subtle.encrypt or tweetnacl something to check the overhead (I
do see the webcodec examples show a write/readable stream which allows
promise-based encryption). Arguably this could have been done at the conn
level w/ raw RTC data instead of the media stream level so I wouldn't have to
handle data channels separately, but I see the value in sharing with other use
cases of client-side stream manip.

------
dstryr
I am so happy Jitsi exists. My friends and I have a room that we regularly pop
into to say hi or play games together.

The mobile app I downloaded through F-Droid works incredibly well, and for
those of you Firefox users who aren't having the best experience, I recommend
using the Electron desktop app [[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-
electron/releases](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases)].

I've been using the Jitsi Electron app in conjunction with OBS + the
VirtualCam plugin to share games, videos and my desktop. Hopefully I can
convert more Zoom users.

------
jka
Random fact: the 'Big Buck Bunny'[1] short film that the presenter shares
during the screen-and-audio-sharing demo was made by the Blender
Foundation[2], an organization that develops open and free content creation
tools.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Buck_Bunny)

[2] - [https://blender.org/foundation/](https://blender.org/foundation/)

~~~
saghul
I didn't choose it at random ;-)

~~~
jordigh
BBB has kind of become the Lena of video testing, but I've always been more
partial to Sintel myself.

[https://durian.blender.org/download/](https://durian.blender.org/download/)

------
spoid
I was under the impression that conference calls were not actually e2e
encrypted:

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet#security](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet#security)

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/issues/409](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409)

Has this changed? In the end you could at least self-host though

~~~
BrowserMeeting
Curious, also. I was under the impression that they were not encrypted with
group calls

------
nhumrich
I want to like jitsi, but have yet to use it without participants in the
meeting having issues. It doesn't remember hardware selection, so if the
default hardware is incorrect, you have to change it every time. Often people
arent able to see video, or hear audio. If people aren't using headsets, then
the audio from their speaker loops and causes feedback. Its always been
painful for everyone. But everyone else seems to love it, so what am I doing
wrong? (Running in gcp, fwiw)

~~~
porjo
I just did a quick test using latest Jitsi meet running in Chrome and it does
remember my external webcam settings (saved to browser localStorage). Looping
audio is something that happens on alternative platforms too, so I'm not sure
that's a fair criticism of Jitsi.

------
AndyMcConachie
I hope this crisis causes Jitsi to get some serious funding. I've been trying
Jitsi on and off for about 6 years and it's never been this good. It also
could be a lot better.

~~~
alharith
Just to offer a counter point: this crisis feels mostly manufactured. Zoom is
under a microscope that almost all other comm software would fail just as
horribly, if not worse. Maybe the majority of users here were too young to
remember, but Skype was far, far worse, and did not have same positive
response and seriousness Zoom seems to be having. That said, competition and
alternatives is good!

~~~
Nextgrid
Skype used to be flawless until Microsoft decided to get rid of the P2P model
and replace beautiful native clients with an Electron pile of crap.

~~~
gnicholas
Not sure it was quite flawless, but it has gone from being my first-choice
platform to last place. I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path,
post-acquisition.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I fear that LinkedIn is going down a similar path, post-acquisition.

While I'm sure it could be made worse, I didn't exactly hear anything good
about LinkedIn pre-aquisition, either.

~~~
gnicholas
Fair point. The most noticeable difference so far has been the hardening of
the login wall.

------
rodolphoarruda
Passing by just to say I <3 Jitsi. (being a user for no more than a month now)

That pop-up alert that tells you that you are speaking while on mute is
incredibly smart.

~~~
allset_
Google Meets has this as well, don't Zoom and others?

~~~
amai
I have seen it only on Microsoft Teams. Google Meets doesn't seem to have this
feature. But maybe the availability depends on the browser/OS combination?

------
thomcrowe
I moved to Jitsi a few weeks ago and have been really pleased. Getting people
not used to video conferencing on an in-browser call is much simpler

------
MayeulC
I had a look at contributing to jitsi, starting with translations for their
mobile app, but the CLA turned me away. I really dislike those things.

However, I like the product they are building. Keep it up! I hope the firefox
issues will soon be a thing of the past
([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_t...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=substring&status_whiteboard=jitsi-
meet))

------
electriclove
Sharing system audio sounds great! I'm hoping this makes using things like
Jackbox better.

~~~
fidel100
I gave it a try today but couldn't get it working. I tried both Firefox and
Chrome (in which seems to offer more features). Any help?

------
yjftsjthsd-h
Seems a decent bunch of improvements; sharing system audio is apparently a
useful feature (I don't care, but I see it mentioned enough), and device and
muting changes are nice usability improvements.

~~~
acidburnNSA
Agreed. Glad they're adding things at this kind of reasonable pace.

In the linux philosophy there are other things that can do the audio sharing
(like Pulseaudio loopback modules) but I guess no one should have to learn
those in order to use the simple feature in this tool.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
It's also a cross-platform tool, so it _might_ make sense to do their own
thing that works everywhere.

------
jxcl
I read somewhere that they were working on better Firefox support. Is there
any associated timeline with that?

~~~
multiplegeorges
Much of the hold up is Firefox's lack of simulcast support.

There are a few tracking tickets in Bugzilla for that effort.

~~~
xd1936
What is the alternative that Google Meet, Zoom's web client, etc use?

------
pojntfx
The best thing about Jitsi IMHO is that it scales so well. After having
problems with Nextcloud Talk, I just wrote a chat bot that returns Jitsi links
(see my GitHub if you’re interested) et voilà 100+ people in one conference!

~~~
barbs
Wow. I keep reading that it doesn't scale to those numbers well but it sounds
like you have a different experience? Do you enforce participants to use
Chromium-based browsers?

------
intsunny
I wish jitsi supported mobile browsers. People get really turned off at having
to install yet another video conferencing app (YAVCA).

~~~
smichel17
If you enable desktop mode, it'll with (in mobile Firefox, at least).

...but not well. I can see why they disable it by default, even if I wish they
included a button to proceed anyway.

------
ce4
They also ask for translations at the bottom of the release notes. It's a bit
unusual though that most of the time the translation project on weblate is
locked, but i haven't seen any vandalism

------
darkwater
Nice to hear about the simplified device chooser, I used Jitsi a few days ago
for the first time for a family call and I lost like 2 minutes to realize
where to change the mic input.

------
evolvedlight
I started using this (for
[https://virtualcoffeebreak.app](https://virtualcoffeebreak.app)) but in the
end had to switch to daily.co - the jitsi support for mobile devices is a bit
painful and doesn't work so well. The mobile iframe is quite jarring and
doesn't provide that nice user experience; for example it doesn't detect if
the app is already installed or not.

Having to download an app increases the barrier compared to other solutions.

------
znpy
The banner complaining about not using google chrome (or derivative) is
immensely annoying.

I am using it on firefox and it works anyway, but now my mom is being forced
to use it for work and she's asking whether there are any problems (there
aren't).

they should just take it away already, it's working well anyway.

~~~
lima
This is not true, the whole conference performs significantly worse at much
higher bandwidth usage if there is a Firefox client, due to implementation
limitations.

~~~
keidjfks
In other words, your experience might be good with Firefox, but it's worse for
the others.

------
maxired
I am actually working on a Jitsi meet fork dedicated to agile Team
[https://meet.retrolution.co/](https://meet.retrolution.co/)

So far I added features such as Poker planning and post is drawing. Any
feedback welcome ;-)

~~~
nfc
Hi, I think there could be some synergies between what I'm working on and what
you are doing. Couldn't find a way to contact you other than Twitter or
LinkedIn, if you want to have a talk my email is in my profile :)

~~~
maxired
done ;-)

------
ocdtrekkie
Sandstorm.io community members host weekly meetings on Jitsi and have for a
few months. It's not perfect, but it works and it's open source, and that's
great. I will say the audio on a computer is a bit hit and miss, I often opt
to dial in with my phone instead, which works pretty solidly.

A really nice perk is that you can have your room name URL, and the dial in
number is the same for that URL, so if you reuse the same "room", you can just
know the meeting ID and all, which I haven't really seen from other solutions.

------
293984j29384
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how complicated it is to add authentication
to Jitsi meet. I ended up following a guide I found on their website it wasn't
trivial.

~~~
sbassi
can you please tell me with guide you used? I need to implement Google
authentication for a domain that is using Gsuite. Will appreciate any help.

~~~
loyukfai
Ditto.

~~~
293984j29384
[https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-
domain](https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo#secure-domain)

~~~
loyukfai
Thanks!

------
loyukfai
Wish the next update can improve further the blur background function, right
now it consumes quite a lot CPU cycles, and is not supported on the mobile
apps.

Even better, to support virtual background:
[https://community.jitsi.org/t/virtual-backgrounds-using-
gree...](https://community.jitsi.org/t/virtual-backgrounds-using-green-
screen/31173)

Cheers.

------
ejo4041
Does anyone know how their releases correspond to version numbers? It looks
like they are possibly releasing multiple times a day, or maybe using releases
and tags in a non-standard way. [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/releases](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/releases)

~~~
BGZq7
Not sure I completely understand it, but Jenkins is apparently auto-tagging
things (maybe every commit that passes tests?). I think their actual releases
have "stable" in the tag and release name, so "current" is "stable/jitsi-
meet_4384".

4384 matches the latest versions I'm seeing for Ubuntu and Debian at
[https://jitsi.org/downloads/](https://jitsi.org/downloads/) under "Jitsi
Desktop stable build line". For some reason other OSes seem to be much further
behind.

------
spsphulse
I’ve been using Jitsi for a couple of weeks and my experience has been pretty
good so far.

Got a quick question if someone can answer. Is is some how possible to use OBS
stream with Jitsi? For my use case, I work with an one MS-Excel window capture
& my webcam input capture in the corner, to explain some concepts to my
students.

Any help appreciated.

~~~
seedie
For Linux and Windows yes. There are plugins that can create a virtual cam
[https://github.com/obsproject/obs-
studio/issues/2568#issueco...](https://github.com/obsproject/obs-
studio/issues/2568#issuecomment-603615980)

------
huskyr
I'm impressed with Jitsi, it all works pretty well. The only thing i noticed,
compared to some of the proprietary solutions, is that my laptop got pretty
hot because of CPU usage. I wonder if they're doing anything about that for
the next release.

~~~
fsh
Jitsi simply forwards the video streams between users, whereas some
proprietary services seem to re-encode everything into a single stream. So in
a large conference each client might have to deal with decoding dozens of
high-resolution streams. This is probably very difficult to solve without
reducing video quality.

~~~
huskyr
Ah, i didn't know that. Seems to make sense why Jitsi takes more CPU then.

------
BrowserMeeting
Impressive to see they are still adding features after all these years. I hope
it gets more adoption and gets easier to run a self-hosted version

------
orthecreedence
When I first saw Jitsi a few days ago, I thought "there's an open-source, p2p,
e2e encrypted video chat already? Why did Riot build their own?"

The next day I figured out that Riot's in-app video chat IS Jitsi. The world
made sense again.

------
dvduval
What is the approximate bandwidth cost per user per hour?

~~~
maelito
Probably depends on your connection

~~~
dvduval
Isn't there a cost for bandwidth for the server where you have it installed?

------
sbassi
I would appreciate any help on how to implement authentication with an
external service like a custom domain under Google (Gsuite).

------
k__
I used the hosted Jitsi Meet service. Worked really well. It was just sad that
they favored Chrome over Firefox.

~~~
sleepless
It's a bit amazing that now that the public attention is here, work is
starting to improve Firefox after it was neglected for many years.

------
MR4D
Why can’t I use this on an iPhone?

Would be perfect if I didn’t have to download the app.

