Re: Improving WebRTC video conferencing

[Yasuaki Kudo]

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