[kwlug-disc] Videoconference testing -- please help

[Ronald Barnes]

Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote on 2020-03-17 6:43 p.m.:

> Thanks to Jon, Ron Singh, and Mikalai for helping me test things
> out.

Unfortunately, I was at work and unable to participate.


> I think we determined that Jitsi and Nextcloud talk are not ideal.
> Ron was correct that the application takes a LOT of CPU on the
> client side.

Interesting, I'd have thought Firefox / Chrome / Chromium would have
fairly optimized WebRTC(?) built in. Maybe something to do with it being 
encrypted, peer-to-peer communication?

I see full support isn't cheap (https://nextcloud.com/talk/):

Webinars & public web meetings*
SIP gate: dial in by phone*

* with optional Nextcloud Talk High Performance Backend starting at Eur 
4000/USD 4500



> On my old netbook I could not get any audio.

Could that be the nature of it being an old netbook?  Did you try
reasonably modern hardware?


> Screen sharing did not really work.

That's too bad. When I've tried it, it *appeared* to work, but I was in 
a sad little group of... one.


> Ron was also unable to hear
> anything we were saying, even though he had his microphone and webcam
> shared.

Does 1-to-many work for audio / video?  i.e. everyone watches presenter 
and questions come in via text chat?


> We also tried the demo server of BigBlueButton and that worked much 
> better for us. Audio worked for everybody. BBB deals with PDFs
> really well. However, screen sharing did not work (which may have
> been resource limitations on the server).

Ah, well, this is likely the solution then.


Still, curious about the NextCloud experience and eager to take part in 
some testing.


Opinions on if changing the RAM limit in PHP from a meagre 512MB to 
something like 1GB might help?



> The next steps are to see whether I can make an in-house BBB server 
> work, and test it on that. Otherwise we may just try the demo BBB 
> server for our meeting.
Best of luck!  Hopefully I'll be able to virtually attend a meeting, 
first one in years. I miss KWLUG community.



Thanks for your efforts!

rb