
Jitsi Meet: open-source video conferencing - adrian_mrd
https://meet.jit.si/
======
rnhmjoj
Friendly reminder that meet.jit.si is not end-to-end encrypted. So, unless
hosting your own instance, using the website or the videoconference
integration in Riot means your conversation is routed through an Atlassian-
owned server.

See [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/issues/409#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/issues/409#issuecomment-260652107).

~~~
est31
Are there any E2EE alternatives to it?

~~~
commoner
Nextcloud Talk is end-to-end encrypted, but not as easy to set up as Jitsi
Meet.

[https://nextcloud.com/talk](https://nextcloud.com/talk)

[https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed](https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed)

~~~
emcho
To be accurate: no tool that relies on webrtc is end-to-end encrypted. So, no,
it isn't. It is encrypted on the wire, just like the other tools mentioned
here.

~~~
commoner
Are you saying that the developer's claims in this issue discussion are wrong?

[https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/37](https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/37)

He says that video/audio in calls are end-to-end encrypted when the server is
using the default PHP backend, but not the high-performance backend (an
optional paid and proprietary enterprise upgrade).

> video/audio is already end-to-end encrypted

> By default with the internal signaling backend audio/video calls (no matter
> if 1:1 or group) are end-to-end encrypted.

> and without the HPB its always paar-to-peer [sic] and therefor end-to-end
> encrypted.

> Chat is currently not end-to-end encrypted, only the audio/video of calls
> are.

Someone mentioned Jitsi's statement and the developer responded:

>> But I don't understand why the Jitsi people write, "WebRTC today does not
provide away of conducting multiparty conversations with end-to-end
encryption." That would only be true if I decided to use an additional HPB
solution, wouldn't it? But not out of the box.

> Exactly, I guess for better user experience and performance they have a SFU
> or MCU in place (our HPB is an SFU), and therefor it stops being end-to-end
> encrypted

------
ddevault
We were using this for a while to do meetings for sr.ht, but we recently
switched to - believe it or not - Mumble. It's old and unsexy but damn it's
reliable.

~~~
pingyong
This is coming more out of a theoretical interest, but what are the advantages
of Mumble over TeamSpeak 3?

~~~
ddevault
Mumble is open source and Teamspeak is not, which immediately eliminates
Teamspeak from the candidates.

------
dwohnitmok
The Jitsi team is fantastically responsive at answering technical questions
about their codebase. Some of the code is showing a bit of its age, but
they're constantly renovating and updating it. Thanks for everything you guys
do!

------
speedplane
In 2020, a company that provides a product for free without a standard
business model will be met with skepticism: not just from investors, but from
users.

How is jit.si able to do this for free where many other companies charge? Are
they monetizing user data? Or trying to upsell some parent company services?
Is this an honest-for-goodness non-profit because someone was fed up with
video conferencing?

None of these are potentially deal-breakers, but they need to be transparent
about _why_ they are doing this for free and what they are getting out of it.
In 2020, the understanding of "free" is much more sophisticated than it was in
say 2010.

~~~
saghul
Hey there, Jitsi dev here. Great questions, let me try to clarify.

Jitsi is now owned by 8x8, which has a clear business model. We recently
launched 8x8 Meetings, which is a rebranded Jitsi Meet with a few extra bells
and whistles.

We (Jitsi) have remained Open Source while navigating through 2 acquisitions
(Atlassian and 8x8) and being Open Source is in our DNA. Thus, remaining in
this state was always a non-negotiable item during acquisition talks.

------
unexaminedlife
I have an eerie feeling that one of the next major "scandals" in technology
will center around companies who learn how to abuse the real-time video/audio
capabilities of the browser without disclosing (clearly) to end users the
implications.

These days anyone with a bit of programming knowledge can now open WebRTC
sessions from the server, decrypt the contents, and multiplex streams back to
clients (great for large group video chats). A great capability IMO, but
immense potential for abuse by bad actors. I think now is a perfect time for
people "in the know" to start educating the public on this.

~~~
Sean-Der
There was a bunch of abuse that already happened with host candidates, was
fixed recently though! [0] Tor also did a bunch of really great work figuring
out all the ways you can be fingerprinted.[1]

When I shared [2] a lot of people gave me flack for enabling malware. I don't
come from that background, so hard to think 'how can people abuse this
technology'

It is too late now to roll back all the WebRTC stuff in the browser now though
:) Definitely would be mind blowing how much data is flowing because of it
(and how much money is being made because of it).

[0] [https://webrtchacks.com/dear-ny-times/](https://webrtchacks.com/dear-ny-
times/)

[1]
[https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake/...](https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake/Fingerprinting)

[2] [https://github.com/pion/offline-browser-
communication](https://github.com/pion/offline-browser-communication)

------
gardnr
This is owned by Atlassian. After you submit a pull request they send you a
huge contributor agreement saying that all your contributions are owned by
Atlassian. Fuck that.

~~~
JimDabell
This is a pretty common thing to do – even the FSF does this for GNU projects.

~~~
cycloptic
The FSF situation is a bit different, assigning your copyrights to them is
making a donation to charity. They also allow you to take back the copyright
at any time.

~~~
mikekchar
At least originally, the reason for assigning copyright (and signing a waiver)
was because there were some high profile cases of employers claiming that some
contributions were owned by them when employees did work in their spare time.
I believe it was RMS who decided that legally it was just safer to ask for
copyright assignment. I believe that he later relaxed significantly on the
position, but I think it's still common practice on GNU projects.

~~~
em-bee
it was my understanding that the reason for copyright assignment was that the
FSF believed it would be difficult to defend the copyright of a project if it
was owned by multiple people.

with several high profile cases in the linux kernel i think this belief has
been shown to be overcautious and maybe this has led to a relaxation of the
position.

~~~
mikekchar
That sounds very reasonable. It's very possible that I'm wrong.

~~~
em-bee
i'd like to point out that your theory sounds just as reasonable, and the
truth will only be found by checking actual FSF sources

------
k3liutZu
You can also use the 8x8 meeting experience (which is using the same
underlying technology) free in the browser [https://8x8.vc](https://8x8.vc)

(Source: I work for 8x8)

~~~
piffey
Is this the same as talky.io (which I've used in the past and liked)? All the
same underlying technology as Google Meet, right? WebRTC with some extra
magics?

------
vector_spaces
I've used the Jitsi integration with Riot.im a bit on my self-hosted
Matrix/Synapse server -- I'm always impressed with what a high-quality and
seamless experience it is

------
GrassFedAltCoin
I try to use open source tools wherever possible with my team. Can anyone
experienced with both share how this compares to Zoom or Hangouts? Is it
reliable?

~~~
Old_Thrashbarg
I've been using Jitsi and Google Hangouts for years, and in terms of
reliability/quality, I can't really tell any difference. Haven't used Zoom
much.

The nice thing about about Jitsi is it's the most simple process I've seen:
just tell people to go to a simple vanity URL (URL you get to design) and
that's all. I sometimes find Hangouts confusing with all the invitation,
accepting, etc.

For people I videochat with often, I just say "jump on Jitsi?", then start
typing in URL bar which autocompletes and boom, we're chatting

~~~
sonofgod
Bear in mind that your URL is your password, and you might occasionally get
randos joining you if it's too simple a URL. Happened to me once at work, got
some giggling people whilst we were pairing, they then hung up immediately :)

~~~
avinashsonee
There is an option to add password to the meeting on the bottom right hand
corner.

------
n_cusan
We tried jitsi for a while and found it did not perform well for screen
sharing in large groups (which we use extensively). We switched to whereby.com
(former appear.in) which is not free for group meetings (used to be though)
but is much more reliable. Creating new meeting rooms works the same way as in
jitsi

~~~
saghul
Hey there, any chance you remember when you tested this? We have recently
fixed a number of problems with screen-sharing indeed!

~~~
n_cusan
I guess it was about 6 or 7 months ago. I will bring it up with the team to
give it another try.

------
gibs0ns
We've been using the Jitsi integration with Rocket.Chat for awhile now, it
works seamlessly.

------
guerby
To avoid browser variations with jitsi meet there's an electron version:

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

------
aquadrop
I have tried it some time ago and it was pretty good in terms of video
quality. Maybe someone knows, I was searching for something that would allow
me to have almost local video quality for a chat app. I don't understand why
there's anything that let me do it if I'm sitting on a good wifi and the other
person also sitting in the same building on a good wifi. I even don't care
about latency much, as long as it's withing couple of seconds. Youtube
streamers seems to be doing it somehow, are there options for video chats
apps?

~~~
kabes
Thing is, video conferencing/chat apps use technologies like webRTC (which is
basically RTP). They are totally focused on super low latency (< 1s). This is
understandable, because you can't have a conversation with multi-second
latency. They achieve this by having sub-optimal, but faster encoding
parameters/algorithms and tiny buffers.

If you want better video quality and can live with multi-second latency you
need to look at different technologies like RTMP or HLS, which is what
youtube/facebook streams do.

~~~
aquadrop
I understand they focus on low latency in general, but why it's not
customizable and no one allows to tweak/switch what you prefer? Youtube
streams etc lack interactivity of videochat. It's just I'm sitting in the same
building with another person, on the same wifi with multiple hundreds of
megabits/s available to us, using powerful phones/tablets and there's nothing
that can deliver good quality of video? Seems weird.

------
jfalcon
A while back, I built a site around OpenMCU-ru
([https://github.com/muggot/openmcu](https://github.com/muggot/openmcu)) but
due to changes in html5 (keygen deprecation) it's pretty much broken my site.

But I did want to toss this out there as an alternative to jit.si as it is
functional to h.264 and sip clients and with some other software fronting it
(like Kamailio) could be made to do SRTP and WebRTC with a html5/js sip
client.

------
grizzles
I know Zoom does their codec in wasm [1] and so on, but I don't know much
about how other different webrtc impls work.

Is there any reason jitsi or any other project would be faster / have better
perf than peerjs.com?

[1] [https://webrtchacks.com/zoom-avoids-using-
webrtc/](https://webrtchacks.com/zoom-avoids-using-webrtc/)

------
xtracto
This looks very similar to appear.in . We used to use appear.in about 7 years
ago, when it was open like this. Unfortunately, all of these type of services
require some _kind_ of revenue model, and it usually requires them to limit or
completely close their "open" versions.

------
chrisMyzel
Except for last week (jitsi sucked whenever it was more than two people) we've
been doing weekly videocalls for 11 months via meet.jit.si between Hamburg
(Germany), Goa (India) & South Cambodia with almost zero issues - we even
kicked out webex since jitsi had dial in

------
Jahak
Best open source video conferencing app. Many thanks to the developers Jitsi

------
canada_dry
I've been using their quite old voip app for years. It's simply reliable even
though it hasn't been updated for years.

------
mmcnl
Hosting a Jitsi instance myself. Very easy to set up and works flawlessly.
Highly recommended.

------
ecmascript
Firefox is not supported?

~~~
saghul
We are making progress at making our support for Firefox on par with Chrome
again. This is bound to be complete soon!

------
dabei
Why would you use this instead of Google Hangout?

~~~
habi
Because it’s not Google, and open-source.

------
vasilakisfil
Ok but how can I call mumble from jitsi? If you don't solve this, it's yet
another silo.

------
animalnewbie
I want to see how well this works. I'm here for 5 minutes:
[https://meet.jit.si/SmellyLemonsTeachImpolitely](https://meet.jit.si/SmellyLemonsTeachImpolitely)

All join as many as you can.

Also note that Fx isn't a "fully supported browser" apparently...

~~~
cs02rm0
How did it go?

------
montroser
Not open source but we've been using [https://team.video](https://team.video)
for our standup calls. The timer feature in the agenda sidebar can be pretty
handy sometimes.

~~~
maqp
I think it's unwise to offer

1) proprietary solutions in the age of surveillance capitalism.

2) offer in-browser cryptography to ensure security. I don't see any end-to-
end encryption elements in that. Your data gets essentially delivered to the
service. Do we really want that? Haven't the companies like FB already shown
you should never trust them with your data? I mean, I'm baffled to see people
would go in circles and instead of realizing the fundamental fault (lack of
privacy by design), they go for the next vendor who promises not to abuse
their data. Well no surprise there, for these services the business model IS
the data. And it will never change unless they prove it won't be used by
switching on E2EE and allowing anonymous registration and use via Tor.

At least back in the day Jitsi offered E2EE for VoIP and video with ZRTP +
SRTP. I'm not sure what the case is now but people, think twice before you
sign up to these "free" and fun one-click sites.

~~~
animalnewbie
Umm what phone are you using? I hope you realize that contrary to what you
think Android isn't completely open source and some of the most key parts are
owned by probably the biggest enemy of privacy on Earth.

~~~
knocte
But it's more opensource than iOS.

~~~
paulcarroty
It feels like "more pregnant".

~~~
teddyh
Perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good.

~~~
fsflover
Unless "the good" (Android) is funded by the "evil" (Google).

