LNXMuSCNS video meetings on Saturday / 6pm GMT / 8pm CEST / 14.00 EDT

[mcord]

I'm going to check in tonight in case someone is around.

[folderol]

For some reason I couldn't get and sound last time. I'm now wondering if it a browser issue, as I've had it working before. Next time I'll try a different one.

[erlkönig]

...assuming https://fairmeeting.net/alinuxmusiciansvideomeeting is still the right place: is anyone there? Seems to be i'm the only one on this place, in spite of cold beer and the coolest rock'n'roll dog on the screen...

[folderol]

Argh! I meant to drop in today, but totally forgot

[erlkönig]

...is anyone going to be there, this evening, or whatever timezone you're in?

[folderol]

I'll tie a knot in my handkerchief to remind me. I'll aim for about 17:00 UTC

[erlkönig]

cu

[erlkönig]

sorry, don't know, if i was suddenly unworthy or simply too silly....

[folderol]

Yes most disappointing. You were fine for some time then it all went nuts!
I had it the other way round, couldn't get heard at first then it sorted out.

[briandc]

Hi all!
I plan to check in tomorrow, just to hear what people are doing these days with their music and linux... hope to see you there!

Brian

[erlkönig]

Hi Brian, i probably will join.

[folderol]

Well I was 'off grid' at this year's Sonoj meeting so couldn't join in.

[mcord]

A fellow Linux musician and I had a chat yesterday. The audio was stuttering very frequently throughout the call, even after we both switched off our webcams. Fortunately, he mentioned giving BigBlueButton (BBB) a try, so we continued on a public instance running BBB. For the time we stayed on (about 10-15 minutes), the audio was perfect.

Considering our/my experience with Jitsi's technical issues in general (such as video turning off frequently and forcibly for everyone, or on one occasion audio not working at all, making us temporarily switch to a different instance), would you be interested in giving BBB a try next Saturday? It's open source, can be self-hosted, and the client part runs in a web browser.

I'm pinging @briandc, but anyone is welcome to share their opinion.

[erlkönig]

hi mcord,

i understand your post probably in a way, that's not intended by you. The problem did not lie in jitsi itself, it probably lied at the hoster or it was a problem on the route. I know jitsi instances, that run perfectly, e.g. https://meet.jit.si/ or https://jitsi.uni-kl.de/, there are much more. Senfcall/BBB was simply the first that came to my mind yesterday evening.
I'm looking forward to next saturday .

[mcord]

i understand your post probably in a way, that's not intended by you. The problem did not lie in jitsi itself, it probably lied at the hoster or it was a problem on the route. I know jitsi instances, that run perfectly, e.g. https://meet.jit.si/ or https://jitsi.uni-kl.de/

I was speaking from experience with Jitsi in general.

I started using various public instances at around 2015, with the intention to break away from Skype and Zoom. In most cases, everything worked fine, but with specific people, the audio and video quality were inferior to those two proprietary solutions, even on https://meet.jit.si/, to the point where it was borderline unusable. (Which was kind of emberrassing for me, because it was me who insisted on using something that was FOSS.)

Also, when Jitsi comes up in conversations on platforms like Reddit, I find that one pain point is almost always mentioned: poor handling of call participants with slow Internet connections. (I'm not suggesting that your or my Internet connection is slow. I just think it's possible that Jitsi was not optimised well to work on all kinds of network conditions.)

That being said, it's entirely possible that the developers of Jitsi have resolved these issues by now and what we experienced last Saturday was specific to the instance hosted on fairmeeting indeed. I'm open to try other Jitsi instances or anything FOSS that is easy to use and works well. And hey, as long as something can be done to improve the experience on the instance we've been using so far, even better.