
Jitsi Meet Electron 2.0 - DerWOK
https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases
======
snikch
I’m loving jitsi, I’ve built a prototype video party app this week focussed on
lockdown parties and fixing the things that don’t work for big parties over
video chat. We’ve had a couple of parties on it and boy has it performed
admirably.

However, there’s a big “but”. The documentation is abysmal. I’m sorry but
that’s the cold hard truth. It’s been a nightmare to understand the pieces
working while also using their libraries. Incredibly hard to read, and
incomplete, docs. I’ve had to refer to the source to try figure things out
most of the time. I say this because I think there’s soooo much potential
there if it was more accessible. If you’re from jitsi and are keen for some
good and critical feedback then hit me up, I’d love to help you out.

~~~
patentatt
I have been thinking about this exact use case! Are you going to share your
party app?

~~~
bkanber
Not OP, but I also made a party app (unrelated to jitsi). It's barebones, but
you can use it free and anonymous at [https://zonko.chat](https://zonko.chat)

------
DerWOK
Though Jitsi is also usable via "zero-install browser only", the electron
package allows additional features like e.g., desktop sharing with remote
control. And due to bundled Chrome, some Firefox RTP problems are also
circumvented with the Electron desktop version.

~~~
app4soft
> _And due to bundled Chrome_

... bundled Chromium, ...

~~~
afandian
Does this have any privacy implications? ISTR Google made it very hard to
remove Google stuff even from Chromium.

~~~
mister_hn
Not that much, just the brand and some less calls to home (but chromium still
calls home)

~~~
MR4D
If Chromium still calls home, does that mean the MSFT has to remove all that
code to turn it into Edge?

If so, that seems like a lot of work. Especially if you want to verify that
it’s removed for future versions.

~~~
Shared404
No, they just have to edit it so it calls home to them.

Still a lot of work though :P

~~~
mister_hn
exactly, see: [https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-
chromium](https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium)

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I haven’t tried this, but I have been on Zoom meetings with 30 simultaneous
screens going at a good framerate on a normal device in Gallery Mode, and 400
participants.

That seems to be Zoom’s signature achievement. I have not had any other
commercial app even come close.

How does this compare, in endpoint software?

~~~
kuschku
we’ve used it with 30 users in gallery mode, works fine. Another group has
used it with 500 people, and it seems to have worked as well.

A major issue is still Firefox, as Firefox does not support simultaneously
sending two WebRTC streams, so Firefox users heavily reduce performance for
all other users as well, but the rest seems to work just fine.

~~~
allan_s
Is there an issue on Firefox side tracking this problem ? as it seems a very
big problem for that specific use case, and may be one of the reason why slack
/ teams etc. don't support firefox in their webapp ?

~~~
Confiks
Various issues that have been open for quite a long time [1].

[1] [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/issues/4758#issuecomment...](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/issues/4758#issuecomment-585674733)

~~~
ComputerGuru
He was asking about an issue on the Firefox bugzilla instance, not on the
Jitsi side.

~~~
Vinnl
The linked comment links to relevant Bugzilla bugs :)

------
Jaxan
I understand the hate for Zoom. But...

We have tried Jitsi a few weeks ago. And we couldn’t scale to meetings with
more than 5 people. We tried our own server and theirs.

Then there is Skype and Hangouts. With both I can only meet for two hours or
so on battery.

Somehow Zoom works flawlessly. Very easy setup and it worked straight out of
the box and is not CPU hungry.

The UX is also great. It’s clear what the buttons are and do. Compare that to
Skype where it’s not even clear when something is a button, and even then it’s
often just an icon, which means nothing to me.

The product is great. But you pay with your personal data, I guess...

~~~
stu2b50
Jitsi uses WebRC, so it's p2p. It's great for 2 person calls, could be good
for 3 as long as you all have good connections to each other, but doesn't and
will never scale higher.

~~~
dan-robertson
I think this is just false. If you have more than 2 people I think there will
be some bridge which picks the speaker and downscales other video feeds

------
hackandtrip
Any difference in the CPU usage?

------
pjmlp
So one app less to worry about unless it is required by a customer.

------
k_bx
Can anyone explain how Jitsi is funded? Who's paying for the resources? Seems
unwise to use software like that that's provided for free.

~~~
cocoggu
From the FAQ : "We are fortunate that our friends at 8×8 fully fund the
project. 8×8 uses Jitsi technology in products like Virtual Office. The open
source community and meet.jit.si service help to make Jitsi better, which
makes 8×8 products better, which helps to further fund Jitsi. This virtuous
cycle has worked well in the past and should continue to for many years to
come."

~~~
k_bx
If Facebook would be ads-free, free, and open-source, would you use it? I'd be
scared as hell. Imagine this line:

> We are fortunate that our friends at GoodCorp fully fund the project.
> GoodCorp uses Facebook technology in products like GoodCorp Social. The open
> source community and meet.facebook.com service help to make Facebook better,
> which makes GoodCorp products better, which helps to further fund Facebook.
> This virtuous cycle has worked well in the past and should continue to for
> many years to come."

And keep in mind that Jitsi seems like a more resource-hungry product (real-
time video).

~~~
dpacmittal
Jitsi being open source removes a lot of that scare.

------
monksy
After seeing seeing how much resources signal or slack takes up due to
electron.. I don't need another app that is this resource intensive.

~~~
jfim
Unlike Slack though, one can close it once the video call is over, and one
shouldn't be multitasking that much while in a video chat anyway.

------
danieldk
Why are the macOS and Windows versions are unsigned?

~~~
tiborsaas
It costs money

~~~
davej
We can help here. We'll do it free. Jitsi guys: Email me
dave[at]todesktop.com.

~~~
oefrha
Not sure I understand your offerings. You seem to suggest that you offer code
signing without an Apple Developer subscription? So are you using your own
certificates to sign your clients’ code? If that’s the case it sounds like
you’re probably breaking TOS and opening up your clients to immense risk: one
client’s abuse results in all clients’ apps revoked.

~~~
davej
Our customers provide the certs. We can sort something out for Jitsi though.
They are on the app store so they most likely already have a cert.

~~~
oefrha
Okay, that’s more reasonable.

------
mimimi31
I've tried it before, but it seems to be only usable with the instance hosted
at meet.jit.si. When I try to connect to any other instance, I'm just getting
the error "external API not enabled". Sounds like there is some default
configuration that prevents this from being used with most selfhosted
instances.

~~~
Nullabillity
The readme mentions this, and how to fix it: [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet-electron#using-it-with-y...](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-
electron#using-it-with-your-own-jitsi-meet-installation)

------
annoyingnoob
I want to love Jitsi, I really do. But the 'Quick Install' of the server
failed for me. So I tried the hosted service and it doesn't work in Firefox.
Jitsi needs to work harder on ease of use.

~~~
ehaughee
Where did you find the quick install and what OS were you using? I was trying
so hard to find a Jitsi server install for Windows but the only thing I found
was a jar+batch file process that I couldn't connect to once I finally got it
running.

------
eeZah7Ux
Janus is easier to deploy and scales well.

------
goodmachine
Before the "We hate Electron" crowd gets here - congrats to all involved on
this release: so far it works great, the UX is simple enough for anyone to
use, it's open source and most importantly - it isn't Zoom.

Good enough for me.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
I'm part of the crowd that dislikes the trend to use electron for everything.
I have 8gb of soldered Ram on my laptop, and will be forced to buy a new
machine because I'm swapping like crazy now. My workflow hasn't changed. My
activity hasn't. But 2 years ago, Firefox and Virtualbox were the only hogs,
for reasons I could accept. Now, dynalist, stremio, discord, signal, pulsesms
and vscode are added to the mix.

However, I understand that said apps may have not existed without Electron at
all.

And especially, for jitsi, I think it makes perfect sense. If you are going to
create an app that does video, audio and web rtc, it would be silly not to use
a battle tested browser engine that does all this already.

Besides, having contemplated the state of UI in a world were you have a
bazillions of combination of hardware type + screen format + OS kernel + OS
version, I have to say Electron doesn't have much competition.

What are you going to do? QT? Phone support is abysmal and it's a pain to
package. Kivy? Super slow, almost no widgets. Flutter ? Uses a niche language
with a very small ecosystem and an unknown life expectancy.

I probably would go with the later, but I can't blame people for taking the
easy road.

~~~
mariushn
So, how to improve Electron?

Does it use a new instance for every app, or it loads the engine once and
reuses some of it for every instance? ie. can Electron be made to work like a
system shared library, similar to GTK/Qt ?

~~~
koonsolo
The real solution is of course to use the web browser as the "shared library",
and develop a true PWA.

I know it's not always possible, but the web now offers a lot of powerful
API's.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
PWA are very limited:

\- can't (realistically) use an alternative runtime. You are stuck with the JS
ecosystem.

\- can't start when the OS starts

\- can't integrate with the UI (task bar, explorer menu, etc)

\- can't run a server in the background for native perfs (like most electron
apps actually do)

\- can't open a server or a communication bus to allow apps cooperation, or
playing well with the OS

\- can't access the file system in any meaningful way to provide any kind of
scanning ability

\- can't store data reliably, or in any reasonable quantity

\- can't call other local apps, run commands, etc

\- can't access local libraries: so you do the crypto, hashing, dataprocessing
in pure js

\- can't access any non standard peripherics

\- can't use the network, forget about avahi/bonjour, broacasting, capturing
packets or doing CORS

~~~
mothsonasloth
You listed a whole bunch of "downsides" but they look more like good security
measures for running an app inside a browser.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Half of the softwares installed on my computer would not run because of those
good security measures.

The browser let you do CRUD apps, with a hint of medias handling. That's it.

And not even good ones since your storage can be wiped out an any moment.

------
EGreg
I don't get it. Why make people download an app when the same thing can work
in the regular Chrome browser? Just bookmark it or something.

~~~
DerWOK
If you don't get it, read the page [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-
electron#features](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron#features)

Just one example: the Jitsi Meet Electron app e.g., allows you to remote
control a screen, if screen owner allows. This makes it a replacement for e.g.
TeamViewer, VNC or so...

~~~
EGreg
Ok but besides that one feature, almost every other feature can be done in
Chrome. I run Slack in Chrome. Why not? Because of some features I don’t need?

~~~
ilikehurdles
I like native apps on my machine. I have enough tabs open in chrome as it is.
And when I want side-by-side views of a Slack tab and some other webpage,
those tabs turn into mutliple chrome windows. Then I'm alt-tabbing between
Chrome - Chrome - Chrome - Mail - IDEA - Chrome - Terminal. Why is it so bad
to install an app? This has been the default since computers became a thing,
so what's the argument for sticking everything into your browser?

------
jlei523
Why do people hate Zoom so much? I just received an email today from Zoom
outlying all the fixes they just released.

They went from 10m users/week to 200m/week in less than one month.

So what they struggled? Most products would struggle with that kind of ramp
up. They owned up to it and fixed pretty much all the complaints. And they're
providing a valuable service to the world, most of it for free.

Stop hating Zoom.

~~~
justinjlynn
> Stop hating Zoom.

No. I don't trust Zoom. I don't like that people like you apologise for them
while they continue to make choices that actively endanger users.

I don't like their business model, and I don't like that I'm forced to use it
to interact with people. I don't like that I can't verify it's doing what it
says it's doing and am actively prevented from doing so. I don't like Zoom and
I don't like that I can't choose to not install their spyware because people
who don't know any better and don't have any way to protect themselves keep
installing it and forcing me to use it.

No. I won't stop hating Zoom until I - and the people who don't know how Zoom
is hurting them and so use it anyway - can be free of it and the people who
make it so awful.

~~~
batiudrami
this is tech, you can't trust anyone. it's par for the course here. zoom just
happen to be chinese.

~~~
justinjlynn
This has absolutely _nothing_ to do with where Zoom is developed or by whom.
It is the stated privacy policy and the software engineering practices to
which the company adheres - and the security best practices to which they do
not - which are abhorrent to me. This isn't about tech. This isn't about
nationality. This is about a social tool being used to exploit people and the
network effects that has on others who may have no choice.

That's why Jitsi Meet is important. It is everything Zoom isn't - while still
accomplishing nearly everything Zoom attempts to accomplish while exploiting
its users. That's why it's important.

Yes, you can trust - so long as you always verify while trusting.

