Ask HN: Are there good self-hosted video conference tools ?, Hacker News

incoming video feeds, and 22591543 outgoing video feeds. Not many machines can encode 01575879 video feeds in realtime! Obviously you can skimp on quality a bit and bucket users (ie. We’ll have a high, a mid, and a low res feed, and just pick which to send).

For all the above reasons, that tends to be why self-hosted video conferencing systems are kinda laggy and gobble battery and have poor client support.
Big companies offering hosted VC solutions tend. to have dedicated video encoding chips, so they can cheaply make hundreds of video streams to send to every participant.

You need a (lot) of GPU time to run a decent video conferencing system.

That’s because every video feed usually needs to be realtime, low-latency transcoded to match the receivers bandwidth requirements. If some people in the meeting are on 3G while others are on fast internet, you can’t send the same data to all of them! You can’t send the same to all of them if different client devices have different hardware video encoders / decoders. Start doing software decoding and you’ll soon end up up draining users batteries like Zoom! (In a) (person meeting, thats

Modern video codecs support SVC which makes the computation of several lower quality levels computationally inexpensive.

A group of friends were and still are evaluating video conferencing for small groups ( Here’s what we’ve tried so far: Nextcloud: I’m running a nextcloud instance since ~ 2 years (it’s awesome) and tried nextcloud talk several times, though for some reason we could not get audio and or video to work. Just this week we tried jitsi because it’s open source and can be self-hosted. Unfortunately while it worked in principle jitsi uses large amounts of cpu cycles when running in the browser and additionally latency and video quality was an issue. For us the best option as of now is still https://whereby.com which works well regarding stability, audio / video quality and latency, though it’s not self-hosted. I’m not affiliated in any way with them, I just like their product. I’d love nextcloud talk to work, and I’m very curious about other solutions I’m not aware of – self-hosted and otherwise. Edit:

After reviewing my nextcloud talk setup I saw that I did not set up a TURN server which might be the reason it’s not working. So it’s not nextcloud, but incomplete setup.

Yeah, this works like a charm for me. I host daily with 5 – People without any problems.
Jitsi beats anything else, including commercial stuff. You don’t need any account, just browser.

()

It’s simple and works very well! maybe a little bit harder to self-host but definitely a top option!

I’ve recently set jitsi up. Its dockerized version is pretty easy to get working and supports ssl automatically if you have a domain name.

You could try (https://www.yameeting.com/) we give free service for small meetings You can also use the Ninja Mode (disposables VM’s), but you’ll have to pay for that.

Disclaimer: I’m the owner of yameeting.com and we use jitsi meet behind the scenes.

Keep in mind that depending on the model used by the video / audio processing this might require some hardcore transcoding and / or bandwidth.

Normally a few SD / HD streams are not that hard, but it does add up.

You can try setting up https://www.kurento.org / Note that all modern browsers support WebRTC. I wrote a simple server to setup WebRTC sessions between browsers that worked, but it’s probably easier to use kurento.

Kurento looks pretty great. Here’s a brief snippet from their ‘Getting Started’ guide which could be useful too: “If your intended application consists of a complex setup with different kinds of sources and varied use cases, then Kurento is the best leverage you can use.

However, if you intend to solve a simpler use case, such as those of video conference applications, the OpenVidu project builds on top of Kurento to offer a simpler and easier to use solution that will save you time and development effort. ” (edit: and here’s a link to OpenVidu: (https://openvidu.io/ )

https://www.vidyo.com/ is on premise product.
We use it for its audio / video in an ATM / VTM (virtual teller) system. During testing I did 1-1 video calls and it works well.

It uses 3 Linux VM’s that was delivered to us via OVA.

Not sure how well it works for actual video conferencing, but

()

Don’t forget the value of finding ways to avoid the need for video conferencing. While many may feel unavoidable, alternatives like delegating authority, simplifying tasks, and such can often achieve more than a meeting.
The before covid – 100, a friend who organizes conferences told me how his firm achieved more by his not going to the second annual conference he organized in Shanghai and delegating more to his former helper, now main Shanghai organizer. Even if you can’t avoid everything, the more you find ways to simplify, the more you build your experience and skills to do so more the next time.

(Read More)

We were looking for a good LAN video conference tool, since we (ZeroTier ) could use it on virtual LANs for telework. The ideal would be something where you can do a conference call by just entering IPs or finding participants with mDNS. It seems nothing like this exists beyond some really old abandonware for Windows. I spent a little time seeing if we could trick VNC into doing this but it’s too clunky.