Upcoming apps
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Hi everyone,
in the past weeks I have been working with the Cloudron team to make Kopano Meet available as an app for Cloudron.
Meet is a modern video conferencing app that is designed as a so called Progressive Web App (PWA) which means that you can add it as an app to your phone/tablet/desktop directly from within Meet and without relying on external app stores. Functionality wise Meet provides 1 to 1 and group video calls as well as screensharing. We are utilising a library called "Glue" which facilitates easy integration into other applications, internal proof of concepts with this have already been done with Matrix and ownClouds new Phoenix UI (based on customer projects).
The app has been released to unstable last week and can be found at https://cloudron.io/store/com.kopano.meet.cloudronapp.html.
Looking forward to your feedback!
@fbartels could you please explain exactly what a "direct connection" means here:
"In the default configuration there is no TURN server configured, so Kopano Meet will only work between users within networks where direct connections are allowed." ?
i.e. would two users of the same Cloudron but in different physical locations on different networks be able to have a call without a TURN server? Or would that require a TURN server too?
Thanks!
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@fbartels this looks great! I'd like to give it a try, but I'm not sure what the 'first time' message is talking about - what's a TURN server, and if I don't have it configured, is it really entirely self hosted?
@thetomester13 TURN is lingo in the networking world. There is even a wikipedia entry for it.
Yes, Meet is entirely self-hosted. even moreso than Jitsi since it does not depend on apps from the Apple and Google app stores to work in mobile devices. But since its not easy to reliable run a turn service (at best two ip addresses, should be reachable on port 443 to not be blocked on public wifi, ..) we are offering it as a service for our customers.
@jdaviescoates said in Upcoming apps:
would two users of the same Cloudron but in different physical locations on different networks be able to have a call without a TURN server?
There is no straight answer to that as it also depends on firewall configuration. In general Meet uses WebRTC to connect the individual users. At best both users can discover each other directly and no external component is required, if that is not the case stun/turn is used to discover each other, do some udp hole punching or in the worst case relay complete traffic (this would then fall on the shoulders of the turn server).
Blog about STUN/TURN https://blog.ivrpowers.com/post/technologies/what-is-stun-turn-server/ (not my blog)
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Been playing with Kopano Meet on a restricted basis on one of my Cloudron instances. Honestly, it's a good, simple solution for certain purposes, but it seems to lack a lot of the features of a full-on BBB/Jitsi installation, for which reason I would still prefer either of those to be available. Perhaps there's room for both to exist on the platform (I think so! They service different niches well), but for my particular desires/plans, the feature set just isn't quite there.
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What’s the status on Jitsi currently? For my usecases I find it powerful to use the apps that do one or a tightly scoped things well rather than installing suite type apps.
So with Riot out the gates and the Matrix app soon to follow, the logical next step for me in that setup is to bring a Jitsi app in under the same roof (Riot+Matrix uses Jitsi under the hood).
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What’s the status on Jitsi currently? For my usecases I find it powerful to use the apps that do one or a tightly scoped things well rather than installing suite type apps.
So with Riot out the gates and the Matrix app soon to follow, the logical next step for me in that setup is to bring a Jitsi app in under the same roof (Riot+Matrix uses Jitsi under the hood).
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@thetomester13 TURN is lingo in the networking world. There is even a wikipedia entry for it.
Yes, Meet is entirely self-hosted. even moreso than Jitsi since it does not depend on apps from the Apple and Google app stores to work in mobile devices. But since its not easy to reliable run a turn service (at best two ip addresses, should be reachable on port 443 to not be blocked on public wifi, ..) we are offering it as a service for our customers.
@jdaviescoates said in Upcoming apps:
would two users of the same Cloudron but in different physical locations on different networks be able to have a call without a TURN server?
There is no straight answer to that as it also depends on firewall configuration. In general Meet uses WebRTC to connect the individual users. At best both users can discover each other directly and no external component is required, if that is not the case stun/turn is used to discover each other, do some udp hole punching or in the worst case relay complete traffic (this would then fall on the shoulders of the turn server).
Blog about STUN/TURN https://blog.ivrpowers.com/post/technologies/what-is-stun-turn-server/ (not my blog)
@fbartels said in Upcoming apps:
But since its not easy to reliable run a turn service (at best two ip addresses, should be reachable on port 443 to not be blocked on public wifi, ..) we are offering it as a service for our customers.
I've not looked at this yet but just found this tutorial about how to set up a turn server to work with nextcloud talk
https://help.nextcloud.com/t/howto-setup-nextcloud-talk-with-turn-server/30794 -
For the coming weeks, we are going to focus on getting some new apps packaged. The list is:
- OnlyOffice
- Bitwarden - @Felix and @iamthefij have done much of the heavy lifting, we just have to get it across the line.
- OpenVPN - We will add an admin interface that let's the admins configure some popular vpn settings.
- BigBlueButton or Jitsi (we will evaluate which works well for conferencing. We have used both and they both work well but BBB might win). If you have any thoughts here, please leave a comment.
- Development apps - basically provide a git push workflow for hosting custom nodejs/php apps (and make it work so that they can be mixed with various caches and databases).
If we should prioritize something else, please let us know! But the above should keep us occupied this month.
@girish said in Upcoming apps:
For the coming weeks, we are going to focus on getting some new apps packaged. The list is:
- OnlyOffice
- Bitwarden - @Felix and @iamthefij have done much of the heavy lifting, we just have to get it across the line.
- OpenVPN - We will add an admin interface that let's the admins configure some popular vpn settings.
- BigBlueButton or Jitsi (we will evaluate which works well for conferencing. We have used both and they both work well but BBB might win). If you have any thoughts here, please leave a comment.
- Development apps - basically provide a git push workflow for hosting custom nodejs/php apps (and make it work so that they can be mixed with various caches and databases).
If we should prioritize something else, please let us know! But the above should keep us occupied this month.
I was just reading this thread and saw this post. Look at all those good things, all accomplished and completed long ago. Well done on work accomplished!
