I always prefer Open Source software, whenever possible. But there are certain occasional use cases where the Open Source options just aren’t that great, and I turn to something closed source, if necessary. Yes, I’m well aware that privacy quickly flies out the window whenever doing this.
I’d like to hear about anecdotes and recommendations about the current choices out there for desktop video chat. Can anyone suggest the clearest, best quality video chat out there for Linux (free of charge, but possibly closed source)? This is best quality in both high, and low bandwidth considerations.
Can you also mention how many KB/sec that your video chat is using (both up and down), with one peer? Whenever the video traffic gets treated unfavorably by ISP’s (net-non-neutrality), that’s worth mentioning also. I’m in Asia, BTW, (Malaysia), often wanting to chat with people in North America.
If I’m not mistaken, DLN tends to favor Zoom these days? I’ve personally tried the freebie version of Nextcloud Talk (even setting up a TURN server), but I was unhappy with it. That was back in Nextcloud 15.
I use Zoom to chat with my kids at University and sometimes I collaborate on-screen with my son to help with homework (not so much this semester). Zoom is free for one-on-one chats and has very up-to-date Linux support.
We have had great success with https://meet.jit.si/ (and https://app.8x8.vc/).
In my experience, it is extremely stable and the video quality is better than Zoom or Skype.
I tried setting up my own Jitsi server, but the QOS rules in place in the network yielded poor video quality (terrible video stuttering), when I tested with another participant. Yes, we were both using the latest Google Chrome/Chromuim, as Firefox isn’t quite up to snuff with WebRTC. And latency wasn’t a problem either, we both had < 100ms latency to my server.
The video quality of Zoom, in contrast, was way better. The framerate was much lower than I would have liked, but at least it didn’t have any abominable choppiness like Jitsi had. I don’t blame Jitsi here, but rather the QOS rules (lack of net neutrality).
It sort of has me thinking that I’ll be made a fool of if I try to roll any video chat solution of my own (like my own Jitsi server), because it’s never the case that I can have assurance of the QOS rules which are between me and all my participants. The QOS rules always have the privilege of unfairly squashing my traffic. I’ll always be a third class citizen, behind the first class citizens of the world, such as Zoom, Google, Facebook meetings, etc.
So this has me turning to something proprietary for video chat, just to not be made a fool out of (when the QOS rules subvert my painstaking self-hosting efforts). Zoom has been embroiled in a lot of security- and privacy-related controversy these days, but my peers unfortunately all use that as their go-to right now.
I’m starting to consider Cisco Webex (the free plan for meetings). Does anyone have anything to say about Webex, positive of negative? Does it do anything creepy?Apparently their security is better than Zoom.
How many meeting participants were there in your meetings? And were they all joining from the same continent? I’ve got groups of participants on different continents: North America, as well as South-East Asia. And my groups range from 5-30ish people.