Re: Improving WebRTC video conferencing

[Yasuaki Kudo]

Or maybe another way to put it, I think we are looking at the need shift the 
focus from "Free Software" to "Societal Knowledge Sharing", the former being a 
constituent of the latter.

Of course, there is even a higher goal of planetary brotherhood 😄, but I think 
we can really broaden and deepen the movement if we focus on sharing knowledge 
- we must remove the information asymmetry which leads to all sorts of 
problems...

If we focus on getting everybody more educated and and make free software 
programs easier to understand for new comers, we will accelerate the speed of 
development.




  


> On Jul 15, 2020, at 12:48, Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I think one way, and this is not just for WebRTC, is to create a huge 
> volunteer organization to analyze, document and add tests to existing free 
> software.
> 
> We can make it a fun, inclusive and participatory project, say a 
> documentation challenge?  If thousands of volunteers do this it will be much 
> easier to start improving software,  I am sure 😄
> 
> Yasu
> 
> 
> 
>>>> On Jul 15, 2020, at 03:38, Ian Kelling <iank@fsf.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 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
> 
>