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Re: Big Blue Button


From: Marc Sunet
Subject: Re: Big Blue Button
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 09:40:01 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.7.0

Maybe we can meet again next week for those who can't make it today. Might be cool to do this recurrently and maybe bring up some interesting topics :)

To summarize, today at 15:00 PST / 18:00 EST:

- BBB server: https://testbbb.fsf.org

- Jitsi server: https://meet.shellblade.net/LiberationTech

As a backup, join #LiberationTech on Freenode, unless someone has a better suggestion.

On 4/24/20 9:05 AM, Jim Garrett wrote:


On April 24, 2020 3:19:06 AM EDT, Ruben Rodriguez <address@hidden> wrote:

On 4/23/20 9:17 PM, Jim Garrett wrote:
On Thu, 23 Apr 2020 12:12:17 -0400 Ruben Rodriguez <address@hidden> wrote:
On 4/23/20 11:49 AM, msunet wrote:
Can you meet sometime tomorrow? I am on PST time, can "leave work" early in the afternoon.
I can join tomorrow too, just not noon to 1pm eastern.
Wow, I'm amazed by all this enthusiasm! I don't have time to respond as quickly as people are proposing, so if anyone would like to go ahead and schedule something, please go ahead, broadcast it here, and I'll attend if I can (and others will too I'm sure).
Tomorrow at 6pm EST works for me, and others have suggested that time. For those who can't make it or want to test the system at other times, feel free to join https://testbbb.fsf.org Note that it is an unauthenticated, single room, demo mode instance. You can find me anytime on freenode.net IRC as "quidam" (and at #fsfsys). While we test it I can provide stats of system load and bandwidth. Please don't use the record feature, as you can't retrieve the recordings anyway, and I would have to remove them ;)
Let's summarize the results on the wiki page. Which implies: we should think beforehand of some specific things to test out. One specific question I have is: can BBB put all participant images on a screen at the same time? Or is there a maximum?*
There is no set limit that I know of, but I don't know how the interface behaves.
And when that maximum is approached, does the system show signs of stress? It sounds like multiple people have had positive experience with BBB, but in truth we haven't yet stressed it for the large meeting use case.
I have only tested it with 3-4 webcams and 20 clients, with maybe 5 people speaking at the same time. It is supposed to be good for up to 100-150 people, but in that kind of scenario most people would have their webcam/audio turned off.
Some additional information I think it would be worthwile to record: - Number of people - Approximate location of server and participants (ballpark, not trying to invade privacy, just trying to get approximate distance from server)
The server is in Somerville, MA. 8 core virtual machine (qemu-kvm) with 8GB ram, running on AMD Opteron 62xx CPU and KGPE-D16 motherboard with a free software BIOS (libreboot) and running Trisquel 8 on both the server host and the VM guest OS. BigBlueButton was deployed with this script I wrote: https://devel.trisquel.info/ruben/communication-install-scripts/blob/master/BigBlueButton.sh It is meant to be used with a frontend (for user management), we use it with Canvas LMS, but it can be used with several other platforms.
- OS and browser each participant is using - Quality of audio: is it scratchy? Does it stutter periodically? How often? - Video: how often does it freeze? How is resolution? Does it align with audio (i.e., do lips move without relation to audio)? - Someone could purposefully go somewhere with a weak WiFi connection and see if the system makes reasonable trade-offs. (My ideal system would automatically downgrade video resolution, then maybe turn off video altogether, and at all times preserve audio quality.) - Also, someone could purposefully use a laptop's speakers and built-in mic to test how well algorithms deal with potential feedback - And add some background noise while at it. This could be fun. Other characteristics? Maybe we could fill out an etherpad collectively while we meet. -Jim *Having a maximum number of videos on screen is an admissible design decision even if Zoom does otherwise. The huge corporation at which I work uses Microsoft Teams, and it puts at most 4 large images on the screen at once. A few additional participants are given thumbnails along the bottom, and people beyond that go off the screen altogether. When someone speaks, their image gets promoted to the large screen. This is probably a clever way to limit computations and bandwidth for even large meetings. No one has complained about it yet.

I have a conflict at that time but please carry on without me! I look forward to hearing how it went.

Jim Garrett

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