Video chat and conferencing options
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I am interested in exploring some options to provide community members, friends and family on the fly video chat/ conferencing. I have been following this thread here https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1958/upcoming-apps/32?_=1585231731638
which touched on upcoming applications- for which MANY were interested in expanding their current video capability.Initially, I am interested in being able to host both 1 and 1 video chats and also group video chats. It would also be nice if others could do the same
I am trying to make it so that there is just a single user login. I have liked using rocket chat, but I am open to other options as well (Riot/ next cloud) In the thread about upcoming app's I saw the Jitsi might be able to also replace Teamviewer. I have also heard of Jami, which is open source and very similar to skype. https://jami.net/ I have not heard any mention of Jami here. https://git.ring.cx/savoirfairelinuxSo far I am leaning towards Jitsi. I really like BBB but I feel it might require more server strength than I can afford. Being able to create a room and have people invited to that room would be nice. I would rather the people invited to that room not be able to see the other rooms or the other people with accounts.
Single login (or as few as possible)
File sharing (similar to next cloud)
1 on 1 video chat ( single click would be nice to launch)
Group chat ( similar to google hangouts)
Screen sharing , white boars, ether pad integrated in video call
Sharing prerecorded video
Ability to create & join conference from smartphone
Recording web conference ( can use OBS)
Remote Desktop like teamviewer. Had not thought about this, but this would be amazing.How are others running things? Would really like to hear about people's set-ups. I am new to this, but learning.
I have a Next Cloud installation, and am considering trying talk. But My understanding is that each person would need to have an account and I do not think you can host many people in a conference.
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Nearly all of those apps require a TURN/STUN server to work well across different networks. We are looking into providing coturn as an addon in Cloudron itself, once that is done, packaging those apps can happen properly to make them useful.
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@nebulon said in [....nearly all of those apps require a TURN/STUN server to work well across different networks. We are looking into providing coturn as an addon in Cloudron itself, once that is done, packaging those apps can happen properly to make them useful.]
I had Turn/STUN on my list of things to investigate. Having them included in cloudron would certainly be preferable.
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@seeker I'd suggest waiting until Cloudron 5.1 when Cloudron should then include a TURN/STUN server.
Hopefully a Jitsi Meet app will then follow soon after, and hopefully Nextcloud Talk with easily be able to use the Cloudron TURN/STUN too (and hopefully Kopano Meet app will then be updated to use it too, and move from unstable to stable).
In the meantime, if you can't wait and still want to do it on Cloudron I'd say you have two options:
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use Nextcloud talk and follow these instructions to install and set-up your own TURN server https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/1846/manual-coturn-install-for-nextcloud/10?_=1585310908753
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use the Jitsi Meet integration Rocket.Chat has (see https://rocket.chat/docs/administrator-guides/setting-up-video-conferencing/ ) - by default this integrates with https://meet.jit.si/ but once Cloudron TURN server addons and Jitsi apps are available it'll be possible to integrate with those instead)
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@jdaviescoates said in Video chat and conferencing options:
Thanks. I can likely wait. I would rather host my own video backed, but, Option 2 can suffice for now as I am planning on experimenting with Rocket chat.
When enabling this, do you know how many can conference simultaneously?
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@seeker said in Video chat and conferencing options:
When enabling this, do you know how many can conference simultaneously?
I don't, but I'd guess it depends on how many other people are using meet.jit.si at the same time.
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@jdaviescoates Ok. Thanks!
To add another possibility to the mix. I ran across a post on reddit asking about how to selfhost a streaming watch party. https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/fryxkc/advice_for_private_media_stream_rtmp/ Among the comments, a user shared they were using VLC with NDI plugin, OBS with NDI source, Docker restreamer, Restreamer Iframe, Some NGINX voodoo (many of these I am not familiar with)
A solution such as Docker Restreamer and OBS is attractive as a webinar platform as a number of the people I am trying to accommodate already use OBS for Teaching and co-learning. While I have been leaning towards Jitsi, I really like Big Blue Button and this might be a little closer to that.
Restreamer seems pretty mature with a docker image, a number of ways to implement and good documentation.
https://datarhei.github.io/restreamer/docs/guides-obs.html
https://datarhei.github.io/restreamer/docs/guides-embedding.html -
We usually use the hosted jitsi for our call but yesterday we gave a self-hosted BBB (not on Cloudron) a try. It was flawless. Now, just have to find out what it takes to get it into Cloudron.
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@girish said in Video chat and conferencing options:
We usually use the hosted jitsi for our call but yesterday we gave a self-hosted BBB (not on Cloudron) a try. It was flawless. Now, just have to find out what it takes to get it into Cloudron.
Very cool. I am still on the fence about which one would be best. Jitsi seems to have alot going for it, but BBB seems much more robust. My sense is that BBB would require a more powerful server than Jitsi.
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I’d be happy to try BBB as well as Jitsi, but Jitsi I can integrate in the Matrix+Riot chat solution, so that’s what I’ll aim for production-wise.
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I'm happy to sign up for testing as well to speed things up. Jitsi seems to be more versatile when it comes to other applications that embed it, seen a few lately that use jitsi as their video option.
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Yup, we are just putting e2e in the CI now with turn support
So, I can put you guys for early release. We will probably need quite a bit of testing to make sure things are reliable. -
@girish You can add me too! I'll be trying both BBB and Jitsi again.
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I‘d be available for testing as well if that helps.
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Me too. We might as well turn the test sessions into Cloudron community chats, so that we have something to talk about.
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Anyone got any experience of:
- mediasoup based conferencing app, such as multiparty-meeting (test here). It was reported on Jitsi forum that it uses VP9 and as a result as got a better quality and is more reliable on Firefox
- Medooze
And how they might compare to Jitsi / BBB / Kopano?
Thanks
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I have to say, Kopano felt pretty slick for a 1on1 call, even on mobile devices over 3G.
I miss- a hand-raising function for a larger group talk though.
- userless calls (though I hear this can be configured)
- pre-made user groups from LDAP user groups
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Just wanted to share some update on this. We've published an updated Nextcloud app package which now pre-configures Nextcloud Talk (which is btw based on spreed)
The app update will be available only for Cloudrons already on 5.1
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@nebulon I just tested this with the new updated Nextcloud talk in Cloudron 5.1 and it worked great (I started a call on my laptop on wifi and then joined as a non-logged in guest on my mobile over 4g)
Next to actually test with a real call with multiple users...
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I've just tested Nextcloud Talk on Cloudron 5.1 with myself logged into Nextcloud plus 3 non-Cloudron user guests and it mostly* worked great!
*(one person couldn't see/ hear another, but the rest of us could all see/ hear everyone else
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@nebulon I just tried it and can't get the video of the other person.
chrome says
Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: Failed to execute 'addIceCandidate' on 'RTCPeerConnection': Error processing ICE candidatefirefox
InvalidStateError: Cannot add ICE candidate when there is no remote SDP@jdaviescoates did you just install a fresh nextcloud and it worked out of the box? I tried connecting from 2 laptops on the same lan and afterwards with browser and mobile (different net), neither are connecting properly. At some point it was working after a few minutes, and only once. Any ideas what's going on there?
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@msbt are you on Cloudron 5.1?
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yea I set up a new machine for testing
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Are there any errors in the nextcloud or in the turn addon logs?
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of course now it worked on the second attempt. but restarted both, turn and nextcloud, and now the errors appear again and no immediate connection is possible:
nextcloud log is empty, turn shows the following errors:
Apr 06 15:28:52 105: IPv4. tcp or tls connected to: mobileip:18426 Apr 06 15:28:52 105: session 001000000000000040: realm <desktopip> user <>: incoming packet message processed, error 401: Unauthorizedand this from connection attempt:
https://paste.cloudron.io/oqiqocayez.rb -
Hi all,
after @girish and @nebulon did a extremely well job to add TURN in a short time, I'm curious who is using what for video conferencing via Cloudron (or third party)?
It seems the COVID-19 "lockdowns" or "other ways of living and working" seems to take many more months, so a solid, safe and easy videoconferencing app is very welcome.
Options/roadmaps:
- Kopano-Meet doesn't work (for us)
- Jitsi isn't here yet
- BBB isn't here yet
- Nextcloud Talk is IMHO not really one-click-easy (has anyone experience with 6+ meetings?)
- other current apps on Cloudron?
- other third-party video conference solutions?
I'm curious for your experiences and opinions.
Kind regards,
Marcel
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- I added the webrtc plugin to my Etherpad and, possibly because the video window is rather small, it has been a very handy video chat option due to its clarity (and the audio was fine too), especially since the discussion involved what was written on the Etherpad. All within Cloudron.
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@scooke could you maybe share your etherpad config in an issues at https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/etherpad-lite-app
We have to do some housekeeping for the app anyways soon, so maybe we can include the videochat feature out of the box -
@imc67 Let me explain the situation a bit from the technical side. Here's a very simplified explanation (I am not a video conf expert
)WebRTC provides a peer to peer (p2p) mechanism for 2 browser to connect. In most cases, these 2 browsers can't just directly connect since they are behind firewalls and in internal networks. The TURN protocol helps these two connect.
The above applies only for video calls with 2 people. What if many people join? One has to establish p2p connections between each peer! So, if you have like 5 people, there are p2p connections going from each browser to another. This mesh architecture can fail in many ways which are hard to pin point and debug: the browser has to support taking in 4 streams and mixing them properly in your laptop, think of the latencies being different for each stream, each browser has to be on a network that has enough bandwidth to accept 4 stream continuously etc. This is the current situation with kopano meet, nextcloud talk for multi-party conferences. IMO, this won't ever be reliable in general.
The solution for multi-party conferences is to create a video bridge. The video bridge is a central party to which all the browsers stream to. The video bridge will mix everything and give out a single stream to the browser. There are various approaches to implementing this - SFU, MCU, a mix of both etc. Currently, we don't have a videobridge on Cloudron (jitsi-videobridge is one such project that provides it) and until we have that multi-party conferences won't be reliable. Note that TURN is a per-requisite for SFU/MCU setups as well (it can help establish connection from browser to SFU/MCU).
One thing to remember is that this videobridge will either be network heavy or CPU heavy and this will cost $ based on where the VPS is hosted. There is no way around this for self-hosted setups.
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@girish Great explanation.
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@girish said in Video chat and conferencing options:
One thing to remember is that this videobridge will either be network heavy or CPU heavy and this will cost $ based on where the VPS is hosted.
This is partly why, like some others, I think we'll soon need some sort of multi-host support so that it's possible to have a single Cloudron running over multiple servers (eg with one run vps just for a jitsi or BigBlueButton video bridge)
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@jdaviescoates said in Video chat and conferencing options:
This is partly why, like some others, I think we'll soon need some sort of multi-host support so that it's possible to have a single Cloudron running over multiple servers (eg with one run vps just for a jitsi or BigBlueButton video bridge)
I haven't looked into BBB but Jitsi's videbridge has the capability to be run standalone and can even connect to completely separate jitsi installations. This way, it is just like a CI system "worker" node (or the only office or collabora app for nextcloud). So, we could also look at making jitsi available without the video bridge as cloudron app and then connecting an external video bridge into it.
(I guess I am just trying to find a possible solution for not having to solve the cloudron multi-host problem which is quite a big project).
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@girish Do take a look at "Run your own Skype-like service in less than one hour" by the founder of the Kamailo SIP server open source project where Kamailo works together with Jitsi to enable many to collaborate meaningfully - via audio/video/ screen-sharing in one room - on not "too-big" a server.
Off course, it could be a "premium" Cloudron offering!
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I wanted to follow up. I am thinking about seeing what I might be able to set up this weekend, using my cloudron setup. Much has changed with cloudron wigh @girish and @nebulon (and others) hard work updating Cloudron and getting TURN implemented. (Another thank you)
Much has also changed in the world with covid19.
I am curious what people are running- easily...????????I am still looking for:
Single login (or as few as possible)
File sharing (similar to next cloud)
1 on 1 video chat ( single click would be nice to launch)
Group chat ( similar to google hangouts or zoom)
Screen sharing , white boards, ether pad integrated in video call
Sharing prerecorded video
Ability to create & join conference from smartphone
Recording web conference ( can use OBS)
Remote Desktop like teamviewer. Had not thought about this, but this would be amazing.This is a pretty long list. What would be awesome is getting something off the ground like Zoom. @gish gave an excellent explanation of the hurdles creating a multi user video conference. So am I to assume that at this point selfhosting something like zoom is not really possible?
What have people had a chance to experiment with?
How many have people been able to create a group video chat with utilizing cloudron?
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@seeker said in Video chat and conferencing options:
While there are many solutions around that could fit your needs, I can only share what I am personally using/recommending for the various use cases you describe:
I am still looking for:
Single login (or as few as possible)Use oidc (OpenID Connect) whenever possible. As for oidc providers: you can use Kopano Meet (check @fbartels post on this for further information: Link) or Rocket.Chat as oidc providers for example. Many apps (Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat, NodeBB with plugin) support OpenID Connect.
File sharing (similar to next cloud)
I personally like Nextcloud for file sharing (and just for that purpose)
1 on 1 video chat ( single click would be nice to launch)
Kopano Meet is a great option here. No plugins necessary, works on mobile devices, private (internal) and external video chat with guests possible.
Group chat ( similar to google hangouts or zoom)
For group video chat, something with a MCU/videobridge would be necessary. Jitsi would be great for this, but packaging seems to be not an easy task.
Screen sharing , white boards, ether pad integrated in video call
For small groups with just a few people working on a document together, Nextcloud Talk with OnlyOffice would be an option as well.
Sharing prerecorded video
Not sure about that, maybe Nextcloud?
Ability to create & join conference from smartphone
Both Kopano Meet and Jitsi can be uses from mobile devices. Jitsi needs an app, Kopano Meet uses the WebRTC support available in all modern web browsers.
Recording web conference ( can use OBS)
Remote Desktop like teamviewer. Had not thought about this, but this would be amazing.Not sure about those two. I‘ve read about a self hosted open source alternative to TeamViewer, but haven‘t had a chance to give it a try (would have to see if I can still find the link to that).
Update: The TeamViewer alternative I was writing about was this: https://www.meshcommander.com - never tried nor looked deeper into this though...
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@NCKNE Thank you so much!
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Nextcloud Talk 9 coming out soon with some improvements.
Even more significantly, the high performance backend has been open sourced:
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2541/nextcloud-talk-high-performance-back-end/
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Jitsi docs got a rework - https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/ and https://docs.easyjitsi.com/docs/welcome. So we will revisit jitsi again after 5.2 release (should be out today/tomorrow).
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@girish Great news. I'm guessing that the folks at Jitsi also feel the pressure from a quarantined world.
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@girish said in Video chat and conferencing options:
we will revisit jitsi again after 5.2 release
No idea if it's useful, but just in case it is, I just came across this Ansible role to install & configure Jitsi Meet on the CoTech forum and the person who shared said "Looks solid, has tests"
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@girish any updates on the estimates so far?
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@potemkin_ai We are looking into packaging jitsi. @BrutalBirdie is helping us out here.
