[Freedombox-discuss] Request for Comments: Agenda Items for 2020 Summit

[A. F. Cano]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2020 at 11:00:03AM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting hjenkins (2020-11-26 03:30:30)
> > I agree on the need for multiperson videoconference hosting in 
> > Freedombox. Though, as Jonas Smedegaard says, the hardware demands may 
> > be beyond many freedomboxes,

My FreedomBox runs on a PCEngines apu1d4, so maybe not the low end, and
I've been running video conferencing for a few months now using the
matrix server on it.

> For the record, I said that _Jitsi Meet_ requirements are too demanding.

That, I have seen, but Jitsi Meet doesn't run on the FreedomBox.  I'm
using Element-desktop (ex-Riot-desktop) on an internal machine.  There
is not much documentation on Element, but it appears to be a GUI front-
end to Jitsi, in addition to managing the chat rooms, users and
encrypted text chats, and it uses about 80% cpu on an i3 3.4GHz quad core.

I regularly engage in video conferencing with 2 other remote people and
it works well enough.  I'm sure it would work better with higher
bandwidth.

Are people thinking of running everything (multiple clients such as
Element-desktop and the matrix server) on the FreedomBox?  But isn't
that what the web client does?  Incidentally, when I clicked to start
the web client, it tried to go to https://app.element.io (I have
JavaScript disabled by default via NoScript).  Since I already have
Element-desktop installed and working, I don't want to experiment right
now.

My 2 video conferencers also run Element-desktop (on Windows) and connect
to the matrix server on the FreedomBox.  One of them commented on the cpu
load.  I suspect most of the CPU load is due to the displaying of the video
and processing of the camera input.

> Other multiperson videoconference hosting exist, including janus which 
> is both light on resource demands and already packaged for Debian.

It would be nice to have interoperability with zoom without requiring
setting up a zoom account, but zoom probably doesn't allow it.  This
kind of inter-operatibily is what videobridge apparently does but I
haven't looked into it.

Augustine

> A demo of Janus is running on a 32bit ARM host with 2GB memory - similar 
> constraints as an Olimex LIME2 - at https://janus.debian.net/
> 
> 
>  - Jonas
> 
> -- 
>  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
>  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
> 
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