Alternatives to jitsi for meetings

Clearing the Path
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So, given the amount of frustration :anger: at the last meeting due to technical difficulties of Jitsi, what do people think of alternatives?

switching back to mumble was mentioned, but @chreekat is apparently no longer hosting the server… could potentially try to find empty channels that are publicly hosted, or other open source vid conferencing solutions? What do people think?

If anyone has any additional input on this please chime in! I’m gonna be looking into other options and maybe we’ll try something else next week depending on consensus.

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+1 to mumble, it seems the most reliable. It’s too bad my server died. Maybe OSU could host a Murmur instance for us?

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As nice as video is, having a reliable voice channel is a basic requirement. I’ll bet OSU would stand one up for us, but it is lower priority than quite a few other things…

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I do run a FreedomBox that hosts a mumble instance here in my livingroom shrug - should be good for audio I guess…

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Sounds like a return to mumble would be the consensus for the time being. Well @mray maybe we could try your freedom box tomorrow?
If that’s insufficient we could find a public chan that we could temporarily use unless there are objections?

agreed @salt as nice as video is, can’t function without reliable audio

Haven’t gotten a chance to test these possible alternatives personally yet but
there’s also:

  • apache openmeetings (released a new version recently)
  • bigbluebutton
  • mconf

IMO I don’t think it’s worth the hassle tomorrow to attempt, because it would be nice to simply have a meeting without prolific technical difficulties. But this would be good to discuss, and if anyone has any insights on any of those that’d be helpful? … I’m gonna work on testing some of those out but will be more difficult to test out internationally on my own :stuck_out_tongue:

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Toot: there’s a mumble server on snowdrift.sylphs.net, port 8008.

teknik.io also has a public server.

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Thanks @iko!

Hopefully both of those will be faster than the freedombox (which didn’t cut it for 4 people).

I will try some test runs to verify before wednesday!

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So the snowdrifts.sylphs.net is working, (thanks again @iko, did you just set that up? jc)

Aaron and I tested it out about 15 miles apart and it was definitely working fine on our computers. Obviously not a rigorous international test with 4+ clients but does seem like it’s working better than the one we tried last time.

I simultaneously attempted to use plumble (the free version) on android and could only use the microphone - not sure about why the speakers weren’t but have definitely seen mixed reviews (with plenty of negatives) about mumble clients on phones.

Anyways if people are willing to give that a shot tomorrow I propose we give it a shot - any other suggestions are more than welcome too

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No problem. The mumble server had been around for a while, but not used much with Jitsi available and people liked being able to connect from the browser.

It’s been a while since I used mumble on android, and only with an external mic, so can’t recall if it ever worked with the speakers on my device. Mumble on ios works very well though.

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@iko I get timeouts on both of your servers, am I missing someting (like port change or password?)

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Think that may be your problem.

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