
Ask HN: What are some open source alternative to Zoom - blohs
What are some self hosted preferably open source alternatives to zoom that also include text chat while on video meeting?
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jeremija
I'm the creator of Peer Calls [1], a peer to peer video conferencing web app
using WebRTC, and it has a basic chat functionality (sending files is a little
quirky). The first release was back it in 2016. Users create a room and share
the link.

It's built in NodeJS/React/TypeScript, and I just recently ported the backend
to Go because I wanted to build a Selective Forwarding Unit using pion/webrtc.
You can test this in the alpha release on peercalls.com/alpha [2].

Would love to get more feedback and/or bug reports! Open source, available on
GitHub [3].

[1]: [https://peercalls.com](https://peercalls.com)

[2]: [https://peercalls.com/alpha](https://peercalls.com/alpha)

[3]: [https://github.com/peer-calls/peer-calls](https://github.com/peer-
calls/peer-calls)

~~~
zalo
I discovered Peer Calls last night and think it’s an awesome project! It
worked flawlessly from both my phone and desktop; it’s one of the
(surprisingly few) fully featured WebRTC chat apps!

My one hope: Could it be possible to select from different audio bitrates when
on a direct connection? High bandwidth audio seems like one of the huge
selling points of P2P chat applications. My naive assumption is that it’s the
sampleRate constraint on the audio stream, but I’m not sure how the
compression works...

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based2
[https://nextcloud.com/talk/](https://nextcloud.com/talk/)

[https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/](https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/)

[https://bigbluebutton.org/](https://bigbluebutton.org/)

[https://openmeetings.apache.org/](https://openmeetings.apache.org/)

[https://github.com/havfo/multiparty-
meeting](https://github.com/havfo/multiparty-meeting)

src: [https://linuxfr.org/news/organiser-des-visioconferences-
de-h...](https://linuxfr.org/news/organiser-des-visioconferences-de-haute-
qualite-avec-le-logiciel-libre-jitsi-meet)

------
codegeek
Check out bigbluebutton [0]. It is open source with tons of features. It
however requires specific Ubuntu 16.04 version and can only be installed on
that OS. It is not the best fit for very large audiences (say over 200) in one
session BUT for that they are working on another load balancing solution
recently [1]

I have been using this for our clients (edtech) for a while and with their 2.2
official version, they made it HTML5 only and removed flash. Works really well
if you follow all the guidelines and installation instructions.

They also have a bash installer script [2] which literally does everything for
you in one single script.

[0] [https://docs.bigbluebutton.org](https://docs.bigbluebutton.org)

[1]
[https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite](https://github.com/blindsidenetworks/scalelite)

[2] [https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-
install](https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-install)

~~~
blohs
Do you have first hand experience with BBB?

~~~
codegeek
yes I have installed it, ran it, configured it and broken it many times :).
Feel free to ask me anything.

------
rvz
Jitsi?

[0] [https://jitsi.org](https://jitsi.org)

~~~
blohs
Does anyone has experience using Jitsi here? What are your thoughts?

~~~
xedrac
Jitsi works great for me. Just know that using it with Firefox is not optimal,
particularly for > 2 participants due to certain bandwidth optimizations not
being available on Firefox. This pains me as a Firefox user.

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derfabianpeter
Jitsi Meet, Matrix or Nextcloud Talk. See more here [1]

[1] [https://www.peter.saarland/hosted-
homeoffice](https://www.peter.saarland/hosted-homeoffice)

------
metah
Jitsi Meet

