Jitsi is definitely the best that I've tried. Jabber is OK, webex is a complete joke, the google ones are OK.
The failure mode for a lot of these services seems to be crappy centralized routing infrastructure. I have way more than enough bandwidth to support like 10x bidirectional 1080p60 streams at, say, 10mbps each, but no service even comes close to that.
I assume that people are working on doing this in a P2P way, but it's hard for some reason.
My only question is how the company behind Jitsi plans to monetise things. This wasn't answered in their FAQ - anyone here know?
> 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.
Game over. Zoom requires no account to join a meeting and I just learned a couple of days ago it even works in the browser (toggle in the account settings of the one starting the meeting)
I even plugged a Logitech c920 webcam in my Xbox One and did a meeting this way using Edge. Sadly the audio API seems unsupported in that Edge so I had to join the audio through another means.
> VS Zoom
> Don't have to fix a schedule. Remotehour enables you to connect when you're online on the app.
Give someone your fixed Personal ID and they can call you anytime.
Only in Chrome, unfortunately, and it's severely limited at that. The most limiting factor is that you can only see one other participant at a time.
Additionally, Zoom's past attempt to prevent you from uninstalling part of their software is extra reason to only use the Chrome version, if any: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20407233
Also, one can use an external mic, w/physical switch and lamp indicator.
Auto-mute has saved me many times tho.
I honestly prefer the push to talk approach for audio too. It is always better to have explicit user consent at every audio and/or video session. Accidents happen.
I've been in the middle of nowhere in South Africa and could use a 3G connection on my phone to speak to people in Germany and the United States at the same time and it was reliable and useable.
But last week we were wondering what would be a good remote alternative to sitting around at our desks and asking a quick question to the room. You know what works really well? Teamspeak. I hadn't used teamspeak in ages, but the simple fact that you can set a global push-to-talk button makes it perfect. Ask a quick question to someone in the room, they answer, if it becomes an actual convo you switch to a zoom call to not bother anyone else.
Looks great, I aim to give it a try.
Pass.
I hope others find it useful, though
Zoom does have a personal room url and a configuration option to open meeting on entry
rest very nice. good idea!
It's the closest I've seen to recreate a coworking environment -- we even have a #lunch channel where we "eat together" at noon (that was a bit depressing to write... we're doing what we can to keep up the illusion of normalcy).
