BigBlueButton: An open source web conferencing system | Hacker News Reader

BigBlueButton: An open source web conferencing system

github.com

127 pointsangristan31 comments

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We use this product on our company of ~150 during the COVID work-at-home thingy.

It's quite great ! It supports audio and video and is quite reactive for us.

Cool. I have a few questions:

How many people can you have in sessions simultaneously?

Do you use the shared whiteboard? What's it like for people without a stylus?

Any idea why it requires such an ancient version of Ubuntu (16.04)?

That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated.

Taking a quick look, this should be able to run without issue on any distribution. They're using Docker to run all the components. No Ubuntu-specific dependencies.

Several schools in the US are using this for online classes in the face of COVID-19.

Do you have some numbers what capacity one needs for this many people? Is it webrtc? Can you have more than 10 in a video call?

How does this compare to something like 'Jitsi Meet'?

A better comparison would be Adobe Connect (https://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html).

Has anyone used both Adobe Connect and BigBlueButton?

IME (remote tutorials, video and writing on PDF slides) Adobe Connect kind of works, but is pretty clunky and awful.

I'm interested to know how BigBlueButton compares.

Last I tried BBb it was clunky and awful. It looks much better now I will have to try it again

It is more oriented to teaching, so it's more classroom style: there is a main presenter and many listeners, it had a whiteboard, things like these. It's quite feature-packed, while Jitsi is maybe more minimal.

Jitsi is like zoom, big blue conference is like webex/gotomeeting

Best open-source, self-hosted solution to this problem. There is a mattermost plugin.

Very easy install, requires a 10 - 15$ vps instance.

Would like to see if anyone uses this on a large scale

Looks like they recommend 500gb storage space for production.. where are running yours?

This seems interesting, but the fact that the officially supported distro is still Ubuntu 16.04 is alarming. There is no good excuse for actively developed software to require an outdated operating system.

I get that it's a LTS platform, but so is 18.04. 16.04 only has ~1 year of support left, so deploying infrastructure on it now is idiotic.

At this point they should at least be recommending 18.04 and should be testing on betas of 20.04 while considering compatibility issues to be high priority.

Seems like a set of ~8 or something core contributors working on this open source project. You talk about it like it's a professional product. Ubuntu 16.04 is still everywhere and I'm sure they have their reasons for not having time to deploy on multiple platforms / architectures / beta lines in order to test changes.

I think you best shot at fixing this problem that has "no good excuse" and using it would be "idiotic" would be to contribute yourself. The least you can do is open a thoughtful issue asking the same things you asked here, but in a way better tone. Even better would be to contribute code but eh, Java.

Edit: another comment in this thread: "That readme is 17months old. and the reference to 16.04 is atleast 3 years old. So it may just not have been properly updated." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22611533

The README mentions a BigBlueButton , Inc.

Haven't really looked into it though.

"If you don't like it, fix it yourself" approach doesn't really work for many just because it's open source.

Why does an open source project has to be mutually exclusive to being a professional product?

If the recommended distro is from 4 years ago, people will feel if it's being abandoned and just go look elsewhere.

> Why does an open source project has to be mutually exclusive to being a professional product?

It doesn't, there are plenty of open source professional products. This doesn't seem to be one of them though, as I would expect a company with for-profit motives behind it if that's the case. This seems to be a project that is merely supported by a company to support the development, which is also fine.

> "alarming...no good excuse...idiotic"

You don't have to use it, but your criticism is excessive. As a casual bystander providing nothing but commentary, you really don't get to choose the priorities and schedule of an open source project.

They provide software that runs on currently supported platforms, and they are working on 18.04 support - sounds like it is the focus current development effort for the next release: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bigbluebutton-dev/qWjV2zoc4h...

especially for some thing that is free

Its been awhile since I used BBB, but I found issues with it when there were over ~20 participants. Anyone know how well BBB scales these days?

Well... the website won't load for me right now, so it's not promising. :|

The website loads, it’s just extremely slow to do so

Just tried their demo -- looks full-featured and solid overall! Setup documentation seems pretty detailed.

That's right. Although I tried to setup self hosted both BBB and Jitsi Meet, and was not rally satisfied. Both had quite some problems with audio and video streams, which either didn't start or froze later. I think that both software are better than I could setup, because I've seen them working pretty good, but I'm not sure what is the secret ingredient.

The secret sauce in jitsi is NAT traversal so make sure you don’t have an overzealous firewall on the hosting server. Second it relies on google STUN servers, changing to different servers or using ips instead of dns may help fix problems on the client end.

Jitsi is amazing when setup properly (I have some deploy scripts somewhere out there, Jitsi is not truely open source as it seems)

Do you have some link to documentation explaining how to setup/debug this kind of things? I tried to deploy Jitsi Meet on a EC2 instance with all access permitted, but it still had quite a few problems. Did not try to tinker with STUN, though.

My search lead me to STUN and TURN server as this secret ingredient. I don't know what they mean though.

Did anyone find a license file? The source code doesn't even have a copyright header.

package.json for the frontend mentions LGPL-3.0, good enough?

https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/blob/65c3a8b1...

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