Candidates for charming - BigBlueButton, Jitsi Meet

framework
1

Would anyone like to work together on charming up some open source video conferencing options?

Jitsi Meet seems to be a relatively simple stack for charming. Its focus appears to be for small group conversations. Its components appear to be:

  • prosody
  • NGINX
  • Jitsi Videobridge
  • Jitsi Conference Focus

BigBlueButton would be a large project, but very rewarding. A BBB instance can support hundreds of concurrent users. Its focus is education and lots of users at schools and universities. Some of its components:

  • BigBlueButton itself (which has several subsystems knitted together with Akka that could be charmed independently)
  • NGINX
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • LibreOffice Server
  • Etherpad
  • ffmpeg server
  • Let’s Encrypt
  • Coturn
  • FreeSWITCH
  • Kurento Media Server
  • Greenlight (Ruby on Rails/node.js hybrid)
  • Postgres
2 Likes
2

What is used with nextcloud?

3

Jitsi, I think. Linking together with your Nextcloud charm would make even more sense.

Some further info

https://help.nextcloud.com/t/introducing-a-full-self-hosted-audio-video-and-chat-communication-platform-nextcloud-talk/25721

1 Like
4

Oh


OK, well, Talk is enabled in nextcloud by just adding it in the nextcloud web interface.

I’m not sure if it is enough for a pro-grade system though


5

BBB would definitely offer the community many very interesting and helpful charms beyond BBB by itself. I am not sure I can help with coding, but I can with everything(?) else beyond that :slight_smile:

6

I could help with Python! Please share more information either by PM or in this thread.

1 Like
7

Could contact others in the academic research community (perhaps via PRACE or other collaborations?) who might have developers available to help?

1 Like
8

I might ask https://edgeryders.eu if they would be interested in helping out in some of these projects. Alot of communities look for tools that combine office, conference and social platforms that doesn’t commodity its users by harvesting the data for advertising purposes. That’s why I like https://nextcloud.com

1 Like
9

FWIW Jitsi is also what’s used behind the scenes to provide the audio and video calling features in Matrix/Riot. If it’s possible to charm Jitsi that in such a way that it can be used as the AV link for Nextcloud, Matrix, etc. that might provide a nice Juju-friendly approach where one could compose the charms.

2 Likes
10

:thinking:

Jitsi Meet is sounding more and more like a good first step.

1 Like
11

It seems so.

Some investigation would be needed for my part in how Jitsi respects user integrity, privacy before I would be able to commit to cycles.

Looking at Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitsi it seems rather promising.

What’s your opinion on this? Compare to the existing ‘Talk’ Nextcloud integration.

There is some discussion already https://help.nextcloud.com/t/jitsi-integration-in-nextcloud-talk/75445/7

12

Jitsi’s very good. It is less suitable for large meetings, e.g. more than 10 people, than BigBlueButton, but that doesn’t matter for the majority of cases. Jitsi also seems to have much better integration with other software.

A recent post from Matrix demonstrates this:

@ec0 has been charming Matrix


https://git.ec0.io/alchemy-charmers/charm-matrix

1 Like
13

Finally getting around to weighing in on this - I’ve used Jitsi previously and really like it, and I think it’d be great for folks to be able to charm-deploy it. It’s a great compliment to the “self hosted communications” suite of Juju Charms which are growing in number.

It would be great to be able to have a charm that included the jitsi-meet packages, either snapped or installed via the provided debs, and the SIP gateway, that handled the installation of Java - I believe that the remainder of the solution could be handled by one of the existing haproxy or other load balancer charms, given nginx in this described install process only handles reverse proxying from what I can tell.

If there’s any static content being served by nginx, then likely nginx would need to live in the charm-deployed jitsi, and reverse proxy support would be then limited to fronting the nginx instance for convenient and scalability purposes.

1 Like