Meet Kopano (unstable version) - a few questions & problems :)
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@fbartels Hello, I have a few question about Kopano meet:
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It's says on here that there is no third party, even the server provider cannot access the calls. How is that achieved? I thought that was very difficult using WebRTC. If there is encryption on top of that, would you qualified this service as E2EE?
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Is the experience as stable using chromium-based browsers and Firefox (and Safari)?
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Is there a hard limit on size of conference (as in number of attendees), or can it scale up as long as the server resource scale up?
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How much RAM is necessary for say a single conf with 10 / 20 / 30 pp?
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What codec / compression is used for audio and video?
Many thanks!
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Hi @avatar1024,
happy to answer your questions.
- that is actually the default in WebRTC communications. Connections are then always peer to peer and also end to end encrypted. What this often weakens in other projects is the usage of SFU or MCU services to lessen the upload for the individual. but this also means that then there will be a central instance that needs to receive and decrypt the user connections (the same can be said to all services offering server side call recording or sip gateways, these features simply cannot work with e2ee).
- WebRTC is best supported in Chromium browsers. Firefox is mostly fine as well. Safari is the modern day Internet Explorer and Apple is slow to pick up and fix their browser for modern technology that enables users to escape the walled garden.
- There is no hard limit on Meet or its components itself. Since calls are peer to peer there is hardly an impact on the server for an additional connection (just another websocket connections). The only server side limitation could be turn (for the case where it needs to relay connections) and this limitation is mostly bandwidth. Backend services are done in golang and are able to scale to thousands of connections on ordinary hardware.
- like I said, no real requirements server side. but since its all peer to peer and every participants needs to be connected to every other will likely run into user side limitations (encoding all streams, connection limits, bandwidth) on the clients if you really do calls with 10+ users.
- video is vp8 (because it supported on all browsers and easy on the cpu) and audio is opus. screensharing is vp9 since it requires less bandwidth for needed higher resolution (compared to caller video).
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@fbartels Many thanks for your reply. That's very useful and makes it clear very.
Since what you are describing is a full mesh p2p network typology, is there any optimisation implemented by Kopano Meet (compared to others) to limit uplink bandwidth requirement on each peer to improve the performance and scalability?
As far as I understand it is one of the key limitation of doing things this way (compared to going through and SFU) as a trade off for being able to implement proper E2EE.
You mention VP8 as being easy on the CPU (but also more bandwidth). Do you therefore think that limitation on the user is likely to come more from CPU rather than bandwidth (comparing increase CPU power vs increase in broadband/mobile bandwidth)? -
@avatar1024 said in Meet Kopano (unstable version) - a few questions & problems
:is there any optimisation implemented by Kopano Meet (compared to others) to limit uplink bandwidth requirement on each peer
You cannot generate more available bandwidth through software
Generally speaking connections are limited to 1Mbit each (for video and audio). If there is not enough bandwidth available the browser itself will limit the data transmitted (reduce video quality) until the point where video will be deactivated completely.
@avatar1024 said in Meet Kopano (unstable version) - a few questions & problems
:You mention VP8 as being easy on the CPU (but also more bandwidth).
On of the reasons its so light on cpu is because hardware acceleration does widely exist for it, btw. But yes I think this is a fair statement. In the end you could run into situations where client would be unable to handle all the incoming and outgoing streams. There is a special "audio only" mode in Meet that could kind of help in these situations, as it turn off all outgoing and incoming video (incl. screensharing) and therefore would lessen the load of encoding the video.
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The new update works fine. I had my first guest meeting
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@luckow If you want to have a meeting with iOS users, tell them that they (must) use Safari. There is no app for meet kopano. Don't use Firefox or other browsers on iOS. Safari is the tool of choice. But this is not a meet kopano issue.
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I seem to be doing something wrong with guest-enabled rooms. Guests are still prompted to sign in. Are there any gotchas I'm missing?My fault, I shared my own room URL rather than using the "Share Group link" feature. Maybe a shared room URL should redirect to the guest onboarding as well, since that still contains a link to the login flow?
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@luckow doesn't seem to work very well at all for me
Have tried multiple times now and so far failed to have a successful call.
I've mostly been trying on Firefox on Ubuntu, but have also tried Chromium with very similar results. Shall have to investigate further... (where shall I look for error logs, I wonder...)
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@jdaviescoates said in Meet Kopano (unstable version) - a few questions & problems
:where shall I look for error logs, I wonder..
Yes, that is indeed the drawback with mostly client side applications, server side logs will not really help you. Hints on what could be going wrong can instead be found the the browser console. chrome://webrtc-internals/ can be interesting as well (depending on the concrete error).
What is the exact behaviour you experience? The Cloudron turn is running on port 3478, could that port be blocked for either you or the other user in your call?
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I've also performed a realistic test scenario now and it's very spotty. With three people on different networks in different locations (though geographically pretty close) I managed to get video from one other participant but not audio, and neither video nor audio from the other one.
I tried both Firefox (desktop) and Mobile Safari. Calls are pretty flawless with the same setup on the same LAN (though not the exact same peer devices).
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@fbartels said in Meet Kopano (unstable version) - a few questions & problems
:What is the exact behaviour you experience?
I've done a few tests.
First of all I tried having a call with myself using my laptop on wifi (Lenovo T510 running Ubuntu 18.04 and Firefox 75.0) and my phone on 4g (Wileyfox Swift 2 Plus running Android 8.1.0 and Firefox 68.7.0) but it didn't work at all. No video nor audio.
Not only that but after a while on my laptop Firefox seemed to suddenly be unable to connect to my camera and mic and then would fail to reconnect (this doesn't happen when testing Nextcloud Talk). And then when I clicked the screenshare button (just to see what it was) my whole laptop froze and I had to power off.
Although saying all that, I just replicated the same test and this time it appeared to work quite well. I even got my wife to join in on her phone too and it kinda sorta worked (she lost connection at one point and mostly her video was frozen).
Another time I did a test with my laptop, my phone, and my Mum on her laptop (in a different city). I can't remember exactly what happened, but I think I could see and her my Mum on my phone, but not on my laptop. But she could see me on my laptop but not on my phone, or something like that.
So all in all, in the all tests I've done to date, mostly not really working
(although the test I just did now went OK until there were 3 of us on the call)I've had much better experience using Nextcloud Talk so far, although I have to say I much prefer that way Kopano Meet gets guests to set their name and get their camera and mic working before joining the call. On Nextcloud Talk it's common to have multiple people join and for them to all be called Guest, which can get a bit confusing. I think I'll add an issue to Nextcloud Talk suggesting they make Guests add their name before joining too...
