Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

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I've been futzing about with VoIP since the late 1990's. First as a developer and test engineer and then as just an interested party. When ZRTP came out I was excited, and then Jitsi was developed and I was interested. But everytime I try Jitsi it has terrible quality issues.

About a month ago I evaluated it again, hoping it would have changed since I last evaluated it 2-3 years ago. But it still had terrible quality issues.[1] I want to use SIP instead of Skype, and I want to tell other people to use SIP, but for that to happen Jitsi needs to stop sucking :(

I can only hope this acquisition means Jitsi gets better to a point where I can recommend it, and use it myself. There's a lot to hate about Skype. It's a closed protocol, it's owned by MS, and it's UI is garbage. But everytime I use it I don't suffer from any A/V quality issues, which is actually the point.

[1] By this I mean scratchy audio and video between two test laptops. Whereas Skype had no such problems.

Have you tried Zoom?[1] Seems much better than Skype for business meetings.

[1] https://zoom.us/

Hi there, Jitsi dev here: note that the Jitsi desktop client (the one which supports SIP) is no longer actively developed, it transitioned to being community maintained.

We have been focusing our efforts on Jitsi Meet for past few years: https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/

I'm in the same boat, as I'm sure a few are...we want to get rid of Skype and Jitsi seems to be the best way, but most people don't care too much for video conferencing. Jitsi Meet has waaaay too much overhead if voice to voice groups is all that's needed, especially if you want to self-host.

Is it feasible that the old Jitsi gets a rebirth? It'd be popular, I'm sure.

If you don't care too much for video conferencing why not use something like Mumble[0]. Super simple to install, super easy to maintain (even as your org grows and security rules get complex), supports as many users as you have bandwidth and quality is stellar and the code is open source.

I feel sorry for anyone that has been stuck with Skype anytime after 2007.

[0] Mumble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software)

It sure is feasible, but it would have to come from the community. If you are interested in trying to move it forward, please join our community: https://community.jitsi.org/ and start a discussion!

Can I hijack this thread briefly to ask about that one line: "most people don't care too much for video conferencing". Having worked remotely for maybe the majority of my career at this point my experience is the exact opposite and it seems like the one place wherein we got acquired that didn't have a culture of video chats but was big enough to have multiple cities of offices suffered greatly from the simple fact that teams didn't work face to face when needed, and didn't have the tools to screenshare to collaborate. Body language, eye contact, and being able to look at the same thing when working together seem to me like a pretty fundamentally human thing.

I guess my question is that is it really something people don't care for? In my experience it's just vital and teams that don't do it appear worse off for it. Admitting my bias here though. ;)

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