
Jitsi Meet: An open source alternative to Zoom - LockAndLol
https://meet.jit.si
======
ISO-morphism
I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a
group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience
comparison:

Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to
individually invite other Google accounts.

Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts:
Passable but grainy.

Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small
screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens. Hangouts: Same.

Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.

It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation
with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's
without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would
rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the
same person for their email repeatedly.

~~~
tootie
I can't convince anyone to not use Facetime.

~~~
ISO-morphism
Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've
used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without
Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is
_awesome_ for a family/group of friends with iDevices.

~~~
tootie
I try to avoid Apple products. They're not worth the high price.

~~~
rajlego
hackintosh's aren't all that hard to build

~~~
enitihas
Hackintosh _are_ hard to build, by any reasonable definition, even for an
average HN users. It's possible some people find that easy, but surely it is
much harder than following an even medium difficulty tutorial.

~~~
rajlego
Have you tried building one before? I built mine for the first time in
February with 0 prior experience with such things and followed this guide:
[https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-
desktop-...](https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-
guide/) If you're doing a config with a motherboard that's well used you can
generally find the right configs to use. If you're using something not often
used, you'll have trouble with the initial setup but once you get over that
initial setup trouble in my experience everything will work and stay fine.

There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and
discord if you run into troubles.

I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro
and I can say 100% it was worth it.

------
enriquto
It's very disheartening that when you try to connect with firefox, it says you
should use chrome. This is a direct stab in the heart of the people who would
favor it over zoom because it is free software.

~~~
fergbrain
I use it with Firefox and it works just fine

~~~
Naac
What version of Firefox? What OS?

Can confirm Firefox-dev on Linux has no working video.

~~~
Fice
Firefox 74.0 on Fedora works.

AFAIK Firefox on GNU/Linux uses Gstreamer. Maybe you need to install gstreamer
codec packages.

Update: Firefox switched to FFmpeg and removed Gstreamer support some time
ago. I have FFmpeg installed from rpmfusion, but I don't know if that's
relevant to WebRTC and Jitsi.

~~~
renaudg
Looks like 2020 is still not the "year of Linux on the desktop"

(from a desktop Linux user years 1996-2004)

------
crazygringo
I'm curious... between Whereby and Jitsi and I assume other browser-based
video solutions relying on WebRTC...

...how big is the barrier these days to building a "videoconferencing
platform" supporting millions of people... that runs on a single server?

Because if you need to do is build a pretty website that essentially just
keeps track of meeting names and the names and IP addresses of participants...

...while each client is P2P-streaming their full-res videostream while
speaking or other participants have them pinned... and every other client is
P2P-streaming a low-res videostream to power the thumbnails (and similar
decisions about which computer is the main audio source and when, or picking a
single peer to serve as the audio mixer)...

What else is there to do, really?

(I mean obviously there's fancy stuff you can add like screensharing, chat,
authentication, etc... and browser-specific bugfixes and quirks presumably...)

But are we at a point where anyone can write a functional videoconferencing
platform in a week, and platforms are differentiating mainly on nicer UX and
extra features?

Or is there something huge I'm missing here, where implementing WebRTC is
somehow a lot harder than it seems, and/or still requires server farms to
route the streams through in certain cases?

~~~
Johnyma22
I rolled [https://video.etherpad.org](https://video.etherpad.org) out within 5
minutes. It's a single command once Etherpad is installed (npm install
ep_webrtc).

There is one complication most people don't realize -- Failed Reverse NAT
traversal: For this you need a TURN server (I'm intentionally ignoring STUN
for obvious reasons).

TURN servers have to route the actual media (video / audio) from user a <> b
<> c but only if the user(s) can't directly connect. We hit Tb's a day through
our TURN server and it gets expensive.

But complexity wise, it's an absolute doddle! Give it a go, if you have nodejs
installed 90% of your work is done!

~~~
girvo
Silly question, because I tried to run Nextcloud Talk and ran into odd
connection issues for a user who I believe is behind a corporate firewall and
so I needed to stand up “coturn”: what’s the obvious reason for avoiding STUN?
And what would you recommend as the simplest/best TURN server implementation?

------
wenc
I wonder if anyone (who also has Zoom) could comment on how Jitsi _actually_
compares to Zoom for 20+ people with full video? (since the title pits it
against Zoom)

I'm seeing comments how how good Jitsi is, but can someone categorically say
Jitsi is comparable to or better than Zoom?

The advantages of Zoom are ease of setup, smooth simultaneous video experience
(tiled) for 20+ participants, and breakout rooms. The experience is so good
that I was convinced to fork out my own money for a personal subscription. If
Jitsi can do all of the above, I'd be inclined to try it out for my next
meeting.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Beyond a certain scale there's also Big Blue Button, though it was very
lecture focused last I tried it

~~~
qpiox
We started using BigBlueButton at the the University. I tried to teach and
there is nothing in it that is specifically lecture focused, but if you just
use it as videoconferencing tool with all microphones muted, it does the job
for a one-way communication tool. Once students start asking questions it is
too limited. The chat clutters soon, the option for raising hands or changing
status is useless with large groups. I'd say that the whole interface is
useful only for smaller groups up to 10 persons, definitely not above 100
persons.

I have not tried Zoom or Jitsi Meet in such settings and can't compare. They
both have some useful options and slightly more options than Big Blue Button
(like the Youtube streaming in Jitsi Meet that will save bandwidth).

------
andrepd
I was wondering just now why in the midst of all this remote working boom
Jitsi Meet is seldom mention. Jitsi Meet has been absolutely stellar every
time I've used it. Great interface, not bloated even when running in a browser
with 10+ other people, plenty of options to manage conferences with many
people (raise-your-hand button, selective muting/soloing, etc). Creating a
chat is as easy as typing a name and hitting enter, no account needed! And
getting somebody to join is as simple as clicking a link to
meet.jitsi.net/yourchatroomname.

On top of that it's open source and end to end encrypted.

Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a happy user.

~~~
surround
Jitsi meet is _not_ end-to-end encrypted [1]. Rather, it is encrypted with TLS
between the client and the server, which doesn’t provide the same
security/privacy benefit at all.

The website says it’s “fully encrypted,” which I think is misleading.

[1] [https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/blob/master/README.md#se...](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/blob/master/README.md#security)

Edit: WebRTC does not support end-to-end encryption for multiple peers. This
means it’s impossible for any browser-supported videoconferencing platform to
support e2e encryption, including Zoom and Jitsi. This is where Jitsi actually
has a unique advantage - it can be self hosted, which offers the same security
benefits as e2e encryption.

~~~
emcho
Signaling is indeed over HTTPS and media is encrypted with DTLS-SRTP. No
browsers today support end-to-end encryption for multiparty calls. The
advantage that Jitsi offers there is that you can stand it up on your own
server in just a few minutes and get protection that is equivalent to end-to-
end encryption.

~~~
surround
Coincidentally, the edit I made to my comment is nearly identical to your
comment. But now I’m outside the 1 hour window of being able to edit.

------
P4u1
I've been using Jitsi for a while, even though my company uses GSuite. Not
going into details about the corporate use since many have already, but the
other day it was my daughter's birthday, being on a quarantine and all and
having family in different countries, I sent a jisi link to the family groups
on whatsapp so we could all sing happy birthday together, everybody got in, it
went all very smoothly. Better than the usual business meeting "can you hear
me, I hear you, hello" routine. Thank you Jitsi team!

------
ronjouch
Linux HNers, is there _any_ video-conferencing software that is hardware-
accelerated for us Linux users?

Everything I tried (Jitsi on Firefox or Chrome, Skype, Hangouts/Meet, Zoom,
Slack) consumes a full CPU all of the time (a.k.a. all no hardware
acceleration), making fans spin and slowing down other work.

Advice? I'm using Arch Linux & Xorg on a recent Thinkpad with Intel CPU & GPU,
and the packages mentioned by the Intel section of
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_accelera...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hardware_video_acceleration)
(intel-media-driver, libva-intel-driver, linux-firmware) are installed.

~~~
jasondclinton
Hardware video decode is coming to Firefox on Wayland:
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Firefox-76-VA-
API-Formats)

~~~
ronjouch
Thanks! So that means H264/VP9-based conferencing (-- _EDIT_ but VP8 isn't
mentioned, and that's what WebRTC uses, right? -- _EDIT2_ oh, VP8 is mentioned
in
[https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D65536](https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D65536)
, looks accelerated too, cool --) will be accelerated in Firefox on Wayland.
Great, one more reason to move away from a wmctrl-dependent script I use, and
switch to Wayland.

One more question, in case you know about it:

\- Regarding Zoom/Slack/Skype/etc, okay, I'm not surprised: no one uses Linux,
so from a money perspective, fixing this is ill-spent engineer time.

\- However, I'm surprised that acceleration could be missing in Chrome+Linux
too, because Google _must_ have worked on it to ship a good Google Meet
experience on Chromebooks. Am I missing anything? (Is there a flag /
dependency / binary package I could need to enable it in non-Chromebook
Chrome?) Is video acceleration really positively nonexistent on
Chrome/Chromium on Linux?

------
lpnotes
I'm the creator of a remote-first community/open source project called
CodeBuddies (a not-for-profit), and we built Jitsi into our hangouts (meetings
anyone can schedule to pair program or study together) -- i.e. whenever
someone schedules a hangout to meet with someone else in the community, we
embed Jitsi as an iframe onto the event page.

We initially used Google Hangouts for the project in 2014, and we've been
using Jitsi ever since Google Hangouts deprecated its API in 2017.

I generally love Jitsi; like Google Hangouts, it allows multiple people to
screenshare simultaneously in our virtual coworking sessions. However, I have
stumbled upon a couple of issues with it: \- higher rates of audio or
screensharing issues, especially when the participants are long distance or if
one of them has a poor wifi connection, or is on an older computer. \-
screensharing with the browser extension sometimes doesn't work, or times out

We're actually rebuilding the CodeBuddies platform right now, and for the next
iteration I am strongly considering paying for the Zoom API instead because
it's more accessible to people with lower quality wifi connections and for
folks on older machines.

~~~
opan
Have you tried reporting these issues?

------
pimterry
An interesting anecdote: they're installing Jitsi Meet in all Catalan prisons
as we speak, as the go-to option now that visitors are no longer allowed,
installed on the existing computers (i.e. prison libraries).

They're planning to have Whatsapp setup too as a secondary option, because
it's the option with widest reach, but that requires buying a bunch of new
mobile phones.

More details (in Spanish):
[https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/2020-03-24/videollamadas...](https://elpais.com/espana/catalunya/2020-03-24/videollamadas-
para-aliviar-la-tension-en-las-carceles.html)

~~~
severine
Thanks for the info.

An interesting related question would be what software are the different
national cabinets, states presidencies and other high ranking officials etc
using in their daily conferences.

------
johnxie
We have a lot of experience working with Jitsi Meet, if anyone has questions
integrating Jitsi, free to send me an email john@taskade.com. Happy to help!

~~~
monksy
I found that it had some issues with people connecting via the web clients. Is
there a way to mitigate that or is that just expected with the software?

~~~
johnxie
Do you mean some parties are unable to connect? There are some open issues,
limitations, and Jitsi Meet does not officially support all browsers.

Here is the supported list:

[https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-
meet/blob/master/modules/...](https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-
meet/blob/master/modules/browser/capabilities.json)

For example, Brave Browser is still not fully supported:

[https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-
meet/issues/3978](https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/3978)

~~~
wideasleep1
FWIW, it works great on my Chromebook, meeted up with myself on my Android.
Even used x86 Bromite browser on Chromebook, and even blur background worked
after a slight delay. Impressive.

~~~
johnxie
Thank you!

------
dionisloire
We integrated Jitsi meet into Taskade for collaborative task lists, notes, and
mind maps, with video chat.

You can give our app a try at
[https://www.taskade.com/new](https://www.taskade.com/new) (no registration
needed, mobile and desktop)

Open to any feedback!

------
enitihas
I think it shows the sheer incompetence of Google product management that they
managed to lose the strong hold Gtalk had. Gtalk worked. People liked it.
Hangouts too worked well. I used hangouts in browser in 2013 and it worked
very well.

Somehow google decided to replace hangouts with allo and duo, and then
deprecated allo, and moved to RCS. I never understand how such decisions get
made. Do they think customers have infinite loyalty and will move to any new
product launched by the company. A lot of people I know used hangouts. Very
few use Duo.

~~~
mixmastamyk
No compelling revenue stream, to a company the size of Google. Probably seen
as a fun project that got boring once the hard work (of fixing bugs) started.

------
xiii1408
Back in undergrad (ca 2013) when I got super serious about privacy, I used the
Jitsi client to videoconference with friends over my XMPP server [1]. It was
pretty much the only open-source VoIP solution I could get working at the
time. The experience was actually pretty smooth, with quality comparable to
Skype and Hangouts at the time.

The main pain point was that I had to force everyone to download Jitsi and
connect to my XMPP server...

Excited to see they're still doing cool stuff!

[1]Technically the XMPP server is just session management.

------
cheald
We switched from Slack to Mattermost internally, and while setting it up I
noticed Jitsi integration offered. I've been really impressed by it, and we're
working to move most meetings to it. Some teams are still using Zoom, but I
don't think that's going to last very long!

My Brazilian Jiujitsu academy is trying it out, too, for virtual classes
during shutdown. We just held the first today, and a bunch of non-technical
parents were able to get things set up for their kids so that we could all
attend a class together. It worked quite well. Given the price, it's a really
impressive piece of software.

~~~
Bellyache5
So the Jiujitsu academy is now practicing Jiujitsi!

------
leonroy
Also easy to skin and deploy - we setup a custom branded instance for our
customers to use during the pandemic within a couple of days:
[https://meet.brring.com/](https://meet.brring.com/)

It’s rather incredible what it can do:

* SIP gateway to support inbound telephony dial in

* Meeting recording

* Auto scaling of the video bridges to dynamically handle load

* Native iOS, Android and even Apple Watch clients

All free, all open source. The install videos are also really good indeed:
[https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/](https://jitsi.org/news/tag/tutorial/)

~~~
jdiez17
I also deployed a Jitsi instance and was surprised how easy it was. I have two
questions for you:

1\. Do you see high CPU usage when there are multiple conferences with a few
participants happening simultaneously?

2\. How did you set up conference recording? I know Jibri exists but the
installation instructions are quite confusing. It seems you need a VM per
conference you want to record. Is that the case?

~~~
leonroy
1\. Yes, it has pretty high CPU usage unfortunately and that’s despite the
attempts of Jitsi to offload h264 encoding onto the clients. You could in
theory lock it to standard definition video though which would reduce CPU
usage a lot.

2\. We did not on this instance but we did using their Docker instance which
was very straightforward to setup: [https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-
meet#jitsi-broadcastin...](https://github.com/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet#jitsi-
broadcasting-infrastructure-configuration)

I don’t believe it needs a VM per conference - maybe a ffmpeg process per
instance?

Here's the Jitsi architecture which best I can tell shows JIBRI (recording
part) as a separate, single container:
[https://i.imgur.com/oDSRzF4.png](https://i.imgur.com/oDSRzF4.png)

------
maxnoe
I deployed it using the docker compose Config for my university group in our
rancher cluster: [https://github.com/jitsi-mee/docker-jitsi-
meet](https://github.com/jitsi-mee/docker-jitsi-meet)

We now use it for most meetings, works very well so far, several sessions in
parallel with several dozen people at the same time (but mostly only using
audio).

Screen sharing works fine as well.

We made the experience that they are unfortunately right about requiring
chrome (chromium works fine as well).

Would be great if firefox support could come back.

~~~
JeremyNT
It seems to work in Firefox despite the browser warning.

What do you use for authentication? Do you have an existing ldap server? I
spooled up a server for neighbors and family to use on my personal vps and the
user account management promises to be problematic using the internal auth
mechanism.

~~~
maxnoe
Several other comments have touched on this, but firefox unfortunately while
it seems to work creates issues, even for the other participants. It just
seems a lot less stable as soon as several firefox clients connect.

------
buovjaga
The renovated videobridge will soon get into stable packages:
[https://community.jitsi.org/t/jvb-2-considered-
stable/24314](https://community.jitsi.org/t/jvb-2-considered-stable/24314)

More about the renovation effort: [https://jitsi.org/news/jvb-2-0-preparing-
our-video-router-fo...](https://jitsi.org/news/jvb-2-0-preparing-our-video-
router-for-the-next-10-years-of-video-conferencing/)

------
pgt
If I can offer some UX feedback, the golden rule of all UX design is to
eliminate question marks.

The typing animation in the placeholder draws all my attention. Puzzled, I
tried to make sense of ForwardShelvesCollapseClose for several seconds, when I
should have been reading the landing page copy.

The principle to design by omission is to ask if an element answers the
question you want me to ask, or raises the question you want me to ask, e.g.

1\. "How much does it cost?" 2\. "Where do I buy it?" 3\. "How do I share it?"

------
cjwebb
Whilst its great that people are iterating on existing products out there, I
feel slightly sad that we just have a load of "alternatives" that don't play
nicely with each other.

It would be much nicer if I could use FaceTime, whilst speaking to someone on
Hangouts, plus someone else on Jitsi. Apart from discovery, what is stopping
that? I'm assuming they all use basically the same underlying codecs, of
course!

~~~
justaj
Matrix is trying to close that gap, so definitely something to take notice of.

~~~
cjwebb
This is the first I've heard of it, so thanks for the tip. I'll be reading all
of [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org) tonight!

------
Brakenshire
I was looking at the Matrix clients yesterday, to set up a video chat room for
elderly relatives. Everything seems just a bit too confusing or unpolished. I
want something simple, functional and cross platform. At the moment I’m
feeling Zoom with scheduled meeting times is probably the best bet. I’ll test
this out, but does anyone have any other thoughts, or any non-proprietary
recommendations?

~~~
kgraves
Zoom or Google Hangouts/Meet is your best bet.

I have not seen anything better than these unfortunately in the open source
world that is as accessible or easy to use as those two.

------
blantonl
This is really nice, but who is paying for all the infrastructure and
bandwidth?

Are there more details?

~~~
xiii1408
It's P2P, like most videoconferencing. The server part is just for session
management.

~~~
tommoor
> like most videoconferencing

Well, if there's only 2, maybe 3 of you – anything beyond that is going to use
a server to host the call for reliability.

~~~
pitchups
> Well, if there's only 2, maybe 3 of you...

Do you mean for more than 3 - the call/video is routed through the server and
would consume server bandwidth? If so how is jitsi paying for all this if it
is free?

~~~
tommoor
I don't know how they're paying but it's absolutely 100% routed through a
server.

------
sidcool
I am sorry if this is already answered, but what is the revenue model and how
do they afford a network intensive tool like video conferencing?

BTW, I loved it.

~~~
johnxie
8x8 acquired Jitsi from Atlassian some time ago, see
[https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/atlassian-sells-jitsi-
an-o...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/atlassian-sells-jitsi-an-open-
source-videoconferencing-tool-it-acquired-in-2015-to-8x8/)

~~~
sidcool
Ok, but still, how does 8x8 gain earn?

------
monksy
In trying to get this to work on a multi site configured server. My friend and
I got it working.

He wrote up a guide to getting it working on Centos.

[https://antipaucity.com/2020/03/20/basic-dockerized-jitsi-
de...](https://antipaucity.com/2020/03/20/basic-dockerized-jitsi-deployment-
with-an-apache-reverse-proxy-on-centos/)

------
Nextgrid
I looked at Jitsi recently as I was thinking about self-hosting it (I have the
bandwidth).

My concerns:

It seems to be based on XMPP and require an XMPP server. They offer a quick-
start guide on configuring it however I am not sure how secure the default
configuration is - I'm worried the quick start guide is about "get it
working", not "make it secure" and I don't have XMPP knowledge nor the desire
to learn a complicated protocol just to be able to run this securely.

Why does it need an XMPP server? I do not want nor care about XMPP and
everyone will be joining via browsers anyway. As far as I'm concerned it's
just one (very big) moving part that I don't want to be responsible for.

Overall it left a sour & sad taste in my mouth. There's no way I'm putting
this thing on the public Internet; the attack surface seems too large and too
many opportunities to screw it up.

~~~
manquer
Jitsi uses XMPP(prosody) for MUC- basically coordination and control of
sessions. XMPP is not exposed directly to the user, they use a BOSH client
abstraction to convert that to http. It is actually good design and scales
well. we have scaled the bridge to 500 plus concurrent sessions without lot of
production tuning in non P2P mode (generally harder more resource intensive).

~~~
Nextgrid
> BOSH client abstraction to convert that to http

This still means the outside world can interact with the XMPP server, correct?

If so then this is my concern - an XMPP server seems like a huge attack
surface for the tiny bit of functionality Jitsi needs (I'm confident it's
using less than 10% of the actual capabilities of the XMPP server, which means
the rest of the code paths are mostly untested in this scenario and are ripe
for abuse and potential exploits).

In your case, is this an internal server or is it open to the Internet?

~~~
manquer
It is authenticated, i.e. only logged in users have access. Prosody is well
tested XMPP implementation and is used in many production application.
meet.jit.si is unauthenticated deployment and many people use it.

I wouldn't call it a tiny bit of functionality, MUC and SFU are the two main
components of any video conferencing solution. XMPP helps provide MUC
capability, Jicofo is the component you can see the implementation here
[https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo](https://github.com/jitsi/jicofo)

BOSH does not allow all operations available via XMPP standard, there are
restrictions possible, to maintain security.

------
brewdad
How well does Jitsi scale? Can it handle a group of say 15 or so participants
on a variety of devices?

~~~
ElijahLynn
It is based on WebRTC, so the actual video data doesn't pass through a central
server. Google Duo uses this same technology. There _is_ a central server but
that is just to glue all the handshakes together. The video/audio don't pass
through it, it is all peer-to-peer, so scaling is more so on the client
application and the available bandwidth. WebRTC dynamically changes the
bitrate of the stream depending on connection though, so it should scale
nicely.

I haven't tried a large conference on meet.jit.si yet though, only 1:1. But if
there are performance issues it is likely the client application itself that
needs performance tuning.

~~~
cheald
That's true for 1:1, but 1:2+ does go through the server.

It's scaled quite well for us, though.

------
rvz
That's the problem. This is supposed to be the time for Jitsi to be widely
used and is a credible and a privacy-respecting, open-source alternative to
Zoom. But will it break out from the free and open source audiences and reach
into the mainstream where Zoom is? I hope so and it should.

Open-source, iOS and Android apps, self-hosting, video chat and first class
web client support are all attractive and competing required features to stand
a chance against Zoom and aside from its technical merits, it just needs to be
more aggressive in marketing itself to capture some mindshare. Or even the
name its should be changed to something less clever and to a more user
friendly one which could be a start...

~~~
distances
I don't know the story behind the name, but I didn't realize it was clever and
I do consider it very user friendly -- short, memorable, stands out, easy to
pronounce.

------
jbergens
I am afraid that the free model of their service will not work very well if
tens of thousands of teams start to use this now. It is easier to trust the
known brands and organizations that also charges a bit when you use their
system a lot.

~~~
saghul
Most of the Jitsi devs are employed by 8x8, which offers a service based on
it: [https://8x8.vc](https://8x8.vc) and it also integrates it in Virtual
Office, it's core product. Disclaimer: I work for 8x8.

------
hanoz
Looks good but I am hesitant to recommend it to my children's friend's parents
(who are all trying to settle on a platform at the moment) because of the ease
with which the kids might enter a short room name and find themselves on the
recieving end of an unwelcome 'chatroulette experience'.

It would be good if the app version could have some parental controls added
and/or the web version could enforce a minimum room name length/complexity.
Meanwhile, perhaps a browser plugin to enforce that wouldn't be too hard to
knock up.

------
jpdus
The main reasons for Zooms popularity (and in general the most important
features of a videoconferencing software) are accessibility and reliability.

Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that
space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy
issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will
not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the
former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).

(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)

~~~
swiley
Zoom’s privacy issues are more than minor, if my friends started using it and
I couldn’t get the web version to work I wouldn’t do a conference call with
them.

~~~
anon102010
Can I ask if you are using video conferencing in a business setting?

When folks are trying to get stuff done in tough circumstances NO ONE has ANY
patience for the home built / funky / privacy enhanced multi-click setup.
Especially not the top executives now dialing in from home who aren't tech
forward. IT doesn't want to trouble shoot things either - all of a sudden you
have 1000+ folks video conferencing.

I'd be interested in these dealbreaker privacy problems in the current client.

~~~
swiley
We're using webex at work but I've used half a dozen different tools so far
with friends (no FOSS ones unfortunately) and they all work about as well.

~~~
anon102010
I used to use webex more, but zoom just had had some incredible mindshare
growth. Its literally the first suggestion it seems when there is a problem
with a conference setup. Latency is also good on zoom which makes the audio
side nicer in my experience.

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
We used it for a couple of month but we had 3 main issues

1) for whatever reason the stability dropped significantly during that period.
The first 1-2 month, all was fine. After that, we constantly lost people (we
are in NZ, EU, America's, Asia). Maybe the demand grew but they didn't scale
the servers

2) sometimes we want to quickly share our editor/screen. Sadly the compression
makes it impossible to read text (zoom correctly shows text)

3) we are often in countries with heavy censorship (UAE, China). Only zoom
really works. Not even meet, slack-video, Skype works

------
fuddle
I'm seeing a certificate error on the [https://jitsi.net/](https://jitsi.net/)
domain. Not a great sign.

~~~
ElijahLynn
jitsi.org and meet.jit.si are the 2 URLs that come up in search. jitsi.net
isn't one of them, fwiw.

------
mmanfrin
There doesn't appear to be a share-window/share-screen option which feels like
that makes this a non-starter for a lot of work-related applications.

~~~
joecot
There is, just on a different domain[1]. They had an article[2] about adding
it last year.

1\. [https://meet.jit.si/](https://meet.jit.si/)

2\. [https://jitsi.org/news/introducing-presenter-
mode/](https://jitsi.org/news/introducing-presenter-mode/)

~~~
amrx101
After fumbling for 10 minutes, I still can't find how to share my screen.

~~~
joecot
1) [https://meet.jit.si](https://meet.jit.si)

2) Start a channel

3) Bottom left there's a monitor icon to share your screen

------
cptwunderlich
I've tried jitsi for a group chat with friends, but the CPU usage went to the
roof and we had other problems too. Apparently that's an issue with Firefox,
as I've learned here.

Anyway, we were using talky.io, which is also a WebRTC based solution and it
worked really well. No registration, good Audio/Video quality, screen sharing.
No background blurring though, if that's what you need.

------
leppr
The mobile application needs some work. The essential and basic operations of
creating a room[1] and sharing a link to that room[2] are confusing. Other
than that, the video and sound quality were great.

[1]: There's no "Go" button and no automatically generated room name like on
the web app.

[2]: The menu option is hidden two layers deep and is named non-descriptively
"Room information".

------
Naac
Is the Android App open source? I haven't been able to find the source code
for the play store app on the jitsi github account.

~~~
wideasleep1
I got it off FDroid, so...

------
tekknolagi
To the authors, if they see this: I'm trying to use this to call my mother and
we are both just looking at our own faces. I've confirmed -- via separate
video call on phones -- that we're at the same URL, both look connected, and
both have camera permissions. There's no indication that anything is wrong on
either of our computers.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Great for narcissists.

------
josh_blum
Recently started using this and found it very seamless. There is a Keybase
chat bot to drop meeting links into your conversation so you can jump on a
call: [https://keybase.io/jitsibot/chat](https://keybase.io/jitsibot/chat)

------
jimbob45
What’s up with the name? I’m never going to get my boss on board with a
malware-looking name like that.

~~~
Brakenshire
Slightly surprised by the response, Jitsi seems fine to me. Is it worse than
Slack?

~~~
phendrenad2
I've noticed that a lot of people have an aversion to software that doesn't
have a name that's made from English word(s). This is possibly because the
most common software out there has this property, and so people subconsciously
associate it with quality (exceptions abound, of course, Samsung, Adobe, but I
think that you need to reach a certain size to break free from the negative
stigma in English-speaking countries).

Come to think of it, this may be why Linux is still seen as an outsider to
non-technical people, as though it were less of a serious product than Windows
(which has an English word as a name).

~~~
Phillipharryt
Adobe is a an English word though. More people are probably now aware of the
software than the bricks, but it has a root there.

------
neves
We are using it intensely at my company and after some server upgrades it is
working very well.

~~~
neves
We've more than 500 simultaneous users.

~~~
amikazmi
When you write 500 simultaneous users, do you mean: 1\. 500 users making
multiple calls across our servers at the same time? 2\. 500 users on a single
call?

~~~
neves
It's 1. Big groups in one conference didn't work as well.

------
longtermd
You should really remove all these negative keywords in your URL:
[https://meet.jit.si/NorthernLiesImprisonExclusively](https://meet.jit.si/NorthernLiesImprisonExclusively)

"lies" "imprison" ...

------
the_arun
What is their(Jitsi's) business model if it is free? How do they keep
themselves up?

~~~
ryukafalz
They're currently owned by a VoIP provider that I would guess uses some of the
Jitsi tech in-house. They've been through a few acquisitions at this point and
continue to maintain their free software, so I'm optimistic they'll continue
to do so.

------
GordonS
Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to create an "official desktop client"
using Electron?

Given Jitsi is only reliable with Chrome (for now at least), that might be a
more appealing options for users that use different browsers.

~~~
jamesponddotco
It seems like they already did that[1].

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

------
mindfreeze_
We tried Jitsi recently and it works really well

[https://twitter.com/vibhoothi/status/1241645013299167232](https://twitter.com/vibhoothi/status/1241645013299167232)

------
daffy
I tried suggesting Jitsi for Zoom to a group. I didn't attend the first
meeting, but they said they tested both and found that Zoom was ``much more
stable'' and had ``much better sound quality''.

~~~
distances
FWIW, I joined a Zoom meeting and the audio was all garbled, barely
understandable. Don't know if it matters that one user joined with a browser.
We switched to Jitsi and the session went very smoothly afterwards.

------
nafizh
How does this work for normal video calling e.g. calling your parents? Every
time I want to talk with them, sharing a video link with them first seems to
create a friction. I badly want an alternative to the awful Skype.

------
wintorez
It's actually impressive!

------
itsalidoe
Any of the founding team here for Jitsi? I am helping a friend build a virtual
community and this solution is perfect but we need a bit of help getting
started. Would love to connect jiwanix@gmail.com!

------
dang
Discussed a few weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22477785)

------
thdespou
It's good that you can look at the source code!

------
jaequery
I agree that it's an awful name but it's a superb app! Can't believe this is
open-sourced.

~~~
m3kw9
Eventually it will up sell more features as in all open source projects aim

------
jsilence
Ja, have fun in "demo" and "test"! Meet random people who are just as clueless
as you.

Be nice though!

------
willmacdonald
Has anyone tried the captioning features of hangouts meet. Amazing technology!

Live dictation of everything said.

------
EGreg
What about a web based WebRTC solution? So people don’t have to download
anything?

~~~
Brakenshire
I’m fairly certain this can run in the browser, although it seems to default
to an app download on mobile.

~~~
OrgNet
In Firefox, if you click the 3-dots and then "Request desktop site", it let's
you use the website for video conferencing... (which should be the default
even for mobile)

------
snoowdogg
Great tool! We use Jitsi with our team. Works without problems

------
eagsalazar2
Is this really as good as zoom? Zoom's UX is terrible, the only reason it has
taken over is because they are better at preserving audio quality and doing
echo cancellation than previous contenders.

------
amrx101
I can't seem to schedule meeting like Zoom?

~~~
bonestamp2
I assume the use case there is that you create a meeting and then put the link
in the calendar invite that you send. But, I'd like to know more about how
long your "own" that meeting URL before it expires. I'll ask in the jitsi
forums.

~~~
jdmac
The meeting technically exists as long as there are participants. Anyone can
join the url so if you pick something unique and hard to guess you'll probably
be the only one to ever use it.

------
jhoechtl
Does it fully work on Linux Wayland?

------
highhedgehog
how is this economically sustainable?

------
brigandish
The home page looks like it was designed by a 20 year old who lives in a world
of Javascript package managers.

Get someone over 50 in there to kick them and remind them that "Start a new
meeting" with things like "LeopardBottomSniffer" appearing under it means
_nothing_ to anyone but developers.

Here's a better design, in text:

\- Who are we? This is Jitsi Meet video conferencing \- How do I use it? Just
type a name for your meeting in the box and get started, you'll be able to
share from there.

The old line about "can someone's granny use?" this comes to mind. If I seem
annoyed, I am, we need successful competitors to things like Zoom and Google
but that means getting non-developers to use them.

~~~
Brakenshire
Granny won’t set up a room, but you can send her a link on email or Whatsapp
which can open the chat in a browser or redirect to an app download depending
on platform, and also offer dial in options. That seems as intuitive as the
process can be. The app also seems extremely straightforward. Granny usability
is actually exactly what I’m looking for, and on first glance I’m impressed.

~~~
brigandish
> That seems as intuitive as the process can be.

Have you tried it with a granny? Have you ever trained people in using
computers?

I have, young and old, professionally, some of them grannies, and this does
not cut the mustard by a long chalk. I can imagine a few ways to make it
easier.

