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>> There is no off the shelf software that would allow us to support calls of that size while ensuring that all communication is end-to-end encrypted, so we built our own open source Signal Calling Service to do the job

But wasn't there Jitsi? [0]

I think its great we have competition among Free Software projects so that both can improve. But sometimes I feel like maybe duplicated efforts create two 5/10 solutions. Instead what we really want is one 8/10 solution, or better.

[0] https://meet.jit.si/




There is some duplication of effort but sometimes progress happens via rewrites and that might actually be a faster way to an 8/10 system than direct collaboration?

Also I think it’s interesting to see how this builds on Google’s work (the googcc algorithm). Which of course builds on previous open source work. The underlying technical collaboration happens even with quite different organizational goals and different codebases.


Author here.

All of these things are built around WebRTC to some degree, which was built on previous open source work and standards. We all benefit from many contributions over many years.


As much as I like Jitsi conceptually, it has consistently performed much more poorly than Zoom starting from 5/6 ppl


Same, all my hobby groups switched from Jitsi to Google Meet due to disconnect issues. And Meet is actually pretty good. Can't compare to Zoom as I don't know anybody using it.


It's the first of the links where they say "When building support for group calls, we evaluated many open source SFUs", so I suppose it's either not one of the two with "adequate congestion control", or is the one that did not reliably scale past 8 participants?


Author here.

Jitsi and MediaSoup both seemed to have good congestion control at the time.

And, yes, as mentioned, the primary reason for writing a new one was performance/scalability.


Can you elaborate on the scaling issues you hit (and with which implementations?) I've used Janus + MediaSoup but not Jitsi before for WebRTC audio for web based multiplayer games.


CPU usage was so very high for calls over 5-6 participants. I'm not sure what more there is too it.


Thanks, in Jitsi or Mediasoup or both?


Daily.co has a developer friendly offering that accomplishes this as well. Many offerings available and many reasons to not take on this added complexity.


There is also https://jami.net/. I have no clue how group video calls are implemented though. It seems like it is not an easy thing to do.

https://wire.com/en/ seems to support it, too, although not exactly "large-scale". Audio calls allow for up to 100 participants, for one.


While I love jitsi, i don't think it is E2E?


Author here.

Jitsi is compatible with e2ee. For group calls, almost all of the work for e2ee is in the clients. And Jitsi can work with such clients.


I think Jitsi group calls can be end to end encrypted, provided all participants use Chromium 83, per https://jitsi.org/security/.


AFAIK this was a work in progress[0]. I am not sure what the status of this is now.

[0] https://jitsi.org/blog/e2ee/


AFAIK it's E2E for 1:1 video chats, but not when more are there.


Jitsi does support e2ee for groups as well https://jitsi.org/e2ee-in-jitsi/




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