I’ve been using Jitsi more and more for video conferencing. Some things that stand out:
low friction – all it takes is a URL to start a meeting – no app to install, no account required, invites, etc.
business meetings don’t have the same concerns as school rooms. I don’t need passwords, holding pens, etc. If someone Jitsi-bombs my meeting, we’ll simply start another one with a new URL.
no waiting on the late host to start the meeting – the meeting starts when the first person arrives.
1-to-1 meetings are peer-to-peer, which is efficient and saves server resources
multiple people can share their screens at the same time – simply click o the screen you want to view
leverages modern technology (WebRTC). A modern browser has everything you need to do web conferencing – why should I install specialized apps.
seems to be fairly efficient and reliable. Audio always seems to come through, even on slow connections.
not limited to 45m like Zoom free accounts
backed by US company that does not have the same security concerns as Zoom.
recording meetings locally to your desktop works pretty well – we use it for the TMPDIR Podcast.
The browser platform is pretty amazing and Jitsi is leveraging this. With the broad adoption and support of WebRTC in the browser, the game has changed, and the cheese has moved.
When asked about security, this article came up:
This page explains well the essence of Jitsi – how it is different. Jitsi does not cover everyone’s needs, but for technical people collaborating on technical problems in small groups, it seems to work nicely.
Jitsi is the low friction video conferencing solution that just works – go to https://meet.jit.si and try it now.
Not sure why I find this so annoying – perhaps it’s the one size fits all mentality. In business, we don’t need to worry about zoom bombing – if a meeting gets bombed, we just start another one, so not sure why pass codes and holding pens are forced. This is the classic problem – when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody. Forcing the security on all users just adds friction for people who don’t need it.
I continue to be very pleased with Jitsi for conferencing.
Lately I have run into a number of cases where I create a Google Cal invite, and it automatically created an Google Meet conf event. This confuses participants when there is both a Google Meet and Jitsi conf specified in the meeting. Looking through the Google Cal settings, it appears there is a setting to enable this, so hopefully this situation will improve once this is unchecked.
Just learned today that if you click on the video button while sharing your screen, Jitsi will embed a small camera image in your screen share. This is not the default so you have to click the video button after you share your screen.
Jitsi has this cool noise suppression which I have been using as well for some time now. Give it a shot if you are in noisy environments which sometimes I am in.
Thanks for posting – that article is a very interesting read. This C → WASM stuff is pretty amazing:
RNNoise, as the authors describe it, “combines classic signal processing with deep learning, but it’s small and fast”, this makes it perfect for real time audio and does a good job at denoising.
It’s written in C which allows us to (relatively) easily use it on the Web by compiling it as a WASM module, that combined with a couple of optimizations gets us noise suppression functionality with very little added latency.
Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.
Over the past several months we tried multiple strategies in order to end the violations of our terms of service. However in the end, we determined that requiring authentication was a necessary step to continue operating meet.jit.si.
