Video chat and conferencing options
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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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@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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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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@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.
