I've been reading up on video conferencing Jitsi, Big Blue Button, and
Apache OpenMeetings. For the purpose of making recommendations to
people (and institutions), I'm wondering (1) how well each of these
scales up to larger gatherings and (2) if there is any difference in
likelihood of glitches. With Jitsi some participants have had some
instances of screens not being visible, but other times things work
very smoothly.
I think the obvious thing to do would be to get as many people as
possible to participate in some video meetings and actually see how
things go. How many people would be interested in some video chat
tests? And what city or area would you be connecting from (so we can
find a time that works for all or most)? And we should think a bit
about how we can stress the system a bit.
I'm getting the sense that Jitsi is relatively efficient on the server
side, but perhaps puts more work on the client side, while Big Blue
Button and OpenMeetings might scale better for clients. But I wish I
could say this more definitively.
I created accounts for demos for OpenMeetings and Big Blue Button
(GreenLight). I found that OpenMeetings requested Flash. My laptop
doesn't have Flash, either Adobe or other, so that didn't work for me.
Also, it was very clunky, non-intuitive, and lacked sufficient tooltips
to figure out how to do things. Big Blue Button worked fairly well, as
well as I could tell with a meeting of 1.
Any thoughts?
-Jim