Re: Improving WebRTC video conferencing

[Ian Kelling]

Jim Garrett <jimgarrett@posteo.net> writes:

> I've been trying out various Jitsi Meet instances (including the
> FSF's) and BigBlueButton (BBB) instances and it seems that both could
> use some improvement.  I think the issue concerns WebRTC but I don't
> know how to move forward.  I think we're currently failing to match
> Zoom in quality and we need to figure out how to address the issues
> below.
>
> WebRTC ("Web real-time communications") is a standard implemented in
> many browsers for interacting with the camera, microphone, and also
> handling signal processing and encoding/decoding.  I'm not an
> expert, but it seems that Jitsi Meet and BBB are not really handling
> the low-level stuff.  So when things don't work, or don't work well
> enough, how does one fix it?  How do we even diagnose it, when we have
> a variety of browsers and browser versions?

I suppose those are questions for the projects and the browsers. There's
also something like GNU Jami which works outside the browser.

> There's a question of how we can gather user data for important
> software improvement efforts while respecting privacy (if in fact data
> logging is the way to address these issues).  Any thoughts on how to
> manage this?

I think it depends on the exact circumstances. Thanks for sharing.

>
> Thanks for your thoughts.
>
> -Jim Garrett