Audio/Video conferencing and virtual events tools for remote attendance

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This topic is about evaluating all tools about audio/video conferencing for creating virtual events or meetings.

This topic is a wiki feel free to edit it.

Evaluation

Name E2E Encryption Audio Video Screen sharing Chat Web client License Notes
Jitsi Meet - + + + + + Apache 2.0 Works quite well with few participants. Often disconnects and audio loss were participants need to reconnect. List of public Jitsi servers: 1, 2
BigBlueButton ? + + + + + LGPL Not tested / Made specifically for education.
Tox ? + + + + - GPL 3.0 Not tested / Distributed, no central server is required.
OpenVidu ? + + + + + Apache 2.0 Not tested / Multiple WebRTC video conference modes: One-to-One, One-to-Many, Many-to-Many.
Zoom - + + + + - proprietary Battle tested. Works quite well. Resource heavy (requires lots of CPU and RAM).
mediasoup ? + + + + + ISC Not tested / Testing server: Uninett multiparty meeting
Mumble ? + - - + - BSD-3 Low latency high quality voice chat. Works very well with many participants. 3rd party HTML5 client mumble-web.
Kopano Meet ? + + + + + GNU AGLv3 Not tested / Testing server: Meet
Pion ? + + + + + MIT Not tested / Distributed RTC System by pure Go and Flutter

Tools

Jitsimeter

Tests the network latency and throughput (as well as other information) of multiple Jitsi servers to help choose the best server according to your location. At the time of this writing there are 208 Jitsi servers being tested.

Website: https://ladatano.partidopirata.com.ar/jitsimeter/
Source code: https://0xacab.org/faras/jitsimeter

References

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This seems like a really nice solution:

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It seems like a very good software for online conferences.

Are there any public instances available for testing?

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We are trying some of these solutions at work. Unfortunately, people prefer the user experience of Zoom and it is perceived as more robust that Jitsi. We are still using jitsi from time to time, because it can be integrated in riot.im.

Question: My boss and some other people want to donate some money to riot.im / matrix.org foundation. I think it is a good time, because people will use them more from now on. I am going to suggest them to send it to the matrix.org foundation, because they pay for the servers and they would be the bottleneck. Any idea?

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yeah, jitsi is a bit unstable. But I think that might have to do with the fact that zoom is centralized (I think) and jitsi is peer to peer.

Wow. That’s super nice :slight_smile:

I didn’t get what your question was. Sorry

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At the end we ended up getting a server with riot instance preinstalled from modular.im, to prevent overusing matrix.org. As modular.im is owned by the creators of Matrix, I guess by paying for the server we are also funneling some money to improve matrix.org servers!

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Nice! Can you describe your experience so far and the associated costs (in case you know and are allowed to share)? And also add it to the table above ?

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Yes, I managed all of this personally. People from modular.im were quite responsive, given the circumstances.

We got a small server. Monthly price is 10 USD for the servers and the first 5 users + 1.5 USD per extra user. We got the first month free and a life discount of 20% for being a nonprofit (privacylx could also apply for this).

Communication between users in the new server does not suffer from the lags in matrix.org. The limitations of a small server is not being able to access really big rooms (they claim 99.9% of rooms are OK). The only one I could not access so far was Matrix HQ

Moving from matrix.org to the new homeserver was easy for me and for technologically inclined people, but a bit difficult for others. They have an app from moving the user and join the rooms of the old user, but it is a bit buggy.

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Sorry, when looking at the table I realised I might be a bit offtopic here, because riot is for text messaging. As far as I know, the group videoconferences summoned in riot are done through a jitsi widget, opening a normal jitsi room.

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Ah. I see. No problem. I was also thinking it was strange, but maybe it was something I didn’t know about.

Btw, there are plans for testing bigbluebutton to possibly help some schools have more privacy-friendly videoconferencing (internal link) :slight_smile: