I hosted my first real-world Jitsi Meet videoconference yesterday. It went pretty well, well over an hour actually, for free, gratis, no dollar! I even circumvented the issue of not able to show my fancy-shmancy video of names of participants. As you may recall, one thing that makes Zoom fun is the virtual background, which can be either a static picture or a video. Jitsi has no such feature. To show my video, I loaded it onto a laptop then play the video in a loop in the open-source program VLC. Place the laptop in direct sight of the device that's running the Jitsi meeting, problem solved. A bonus with this solution is that the video's pixelation doesn't look so obvious. Recall that the original source of the video is some GIF animation, which was meant to be viewed as a small part of a web site. Magnify that to full-screen, in a video, and you get pixelation, not very pretty.
The itsy-bitsy issue some of my users had with the Jitsi Meet was that they misunderstood the instruction. It says go to so-and-so link and enter this phrase when you are prompted to enter you-know-what. I like to leave out the word password in my instruction whenever possible, to avoid having the content scanned and password easily detected. What did two of my users did? They launched the Jitsi Meet app and went straight to entering the password as a meeting room. That's the first thing that comes into focus when you use the Jitsi Meet app, it asks for a room name, to either create or join. In effect, my users created their own room, instead of joining the one already in progress. In the future, I may try starting a meeting with no password, to eliminate any possibility of anyone accidentally creating their own room. When there's a core number of attendees having joined, then I'll create the password and let people reach out to me when they are prompted for a password.
With Zoom, you can include the password in the invitation link. That's one advantage Zoom has over Jitsi Meet, but I do wonder if there's some coding that can be added to a Jitsi Meet link that would include the password. I'll check that out and report back...
11 June 2020
09 June 2020
LET US GET JIGGLY WITH JITSI MEET
The Internet is great but sometimes searching it without the exact term to look for can be an exercise in futility. I first heard about Jitsi as a great alternative to Zoom, the videoconference service that suddenly took over the market in the age of COVID-19, on one of the podcasts hosted by Leo Laporte. It's open-source (read:free, to most people) and has no time-limit, not like the 45-minute constraint faced by Zoom non-subscribers. Some time later, someone else mentioned it so I decided to check it out. On a side note, it annoys me greatly that many people these days don't go directly to a website even when one is give to them, but instead first go to Google.com or such and search for said web site. Such action can be so time-wasting, as you don't necessarily find what you need right away. Such is the case with me and Jitsi, in the beginning.
All I had to go by was the term Jitsi so I had to search for it. One link after another, I found myself downloading some Jitsi application for the Mac that prompted me to login, either via Google Talk, AIM, or some other chat network. Definitely not what I was looking for. I used to use x number of chat clients and it was such a pain keeping so many accounts and passwords. I never want to go back to that. Then there was some other Jitsi thingamajitsi that can be downloaded to have my own Jitsi server. Good grief, I just want to start a meeting with someone to test things out, why do I have to setup a server just for that? I started to try to find documentation for Jitsi. Some doc pointed me to jit.si but it's a dead link. Some other doc had a nice table of content but page after page merely says Welcome to Jitsi with no useful content whatsoever. Talk about going down the rabbit hole! Running into cul-de-sacs on the information highway!
What I should really search for was Jitsi Meet. People wrongly associate terms with the actual things themselves regularly, either because they are too familiar with the product, or just ignorance. I've heard users refer to Google Chrome, the web browser, as just Google. It dries me nuts! The best thing I could have done, assuming I had the exact info handy, was to go straight to https://meet.jit.si/ . Jitsi Meet's approach is a bit different, in that you just enter a room name and away you go. The Jitsi Meet web site has some code running that makes up random room names for visitors to use. I was initially lost and used one of those random names just to see what's going on. The thing is just click in the box where the name is being generated and make up your own name then you are all set. Note that there is no scheduling capability. You just create the room on the fly, when everyone gets out, the room disappears. Past room names are remembered by the web browser or smartphone app, so the room can be created anew when needed In a way it looks like the meeting can be scheduled, but it's really not.
Once in a meeting, things are not that much different than Zoom or other videoconference web sites. You can mute yourself, mute participants if you are the host, blur the background, start a chat, the usual stuff. End-to-end encryption is in beta but that makes Jitsi Meet attractive security-wise. You cannot setup a fancy virtual background, so it's a minor loss. (Ironically, just the other day I spent much time cobbling together a process to make fancy video of names of Zoom participants. Now the video is useless for these Jitsi Meeting.)
On a computer, you truly don't need any software. I discovered later the chat client I downloaded is Jitsi Desktop. It has little to do with the videoconferencing capability of Jitsi Meet. Jitsi Meet may be a side project of Jitsi Desktop, but for the average user pretend you never heard of Jitsi Desktop. Just go straight to meet.jit.si . Likewise, you don't need to install any server software if all you want to do is host or attend a meeting. The server stuff is for the Linux platform anyway, like Debian or Ubuntu. I don' care what the Linux gurus say, the average user doesn't need to know about Linux. One more time, meet.jit.si is all you need. You do need to setup a name before you can participate in a chat, but that's the extent of "setting up" to use Jitsi Meet on a computer.
On a smartphone, you do need to install the free app. It's straightforward, nothing to stress about. In case you somehow have to type the name of the meeting, it is case-insensitive, i.e. case doesn't matter. I was worried since Jitsi Meet is open-source and since there was mention of Linux and Unix, a world where case matters, that Jitsi Meetings are case-sensitive also but luckily it's not.
Jitsi Meet is a very viable alternative to Zoom. I got free minutes from Zoom before, I don't know what algorithm determined that, so it's possible your Zoom meeting is long enough to get things done. However, if you don't want to worry about time-limit and can live without the convenience of having a schedule, or the fancy virtual backgrounds, Jitsi Meet is a natural choice, especially for those mindful of spending money.
All I had to go by was the term Jitsi so I had to search for it. One link after another, I found myself downloading some Jitsi application for the Mac that prompted me to login, either via Google Talk, AIM, or some other chat network. Definitely not what I was looking for. I used to use x number of chat clients and it was such a pain keeping so many accounts and passwords. I never want to go back to that. Then there was some other Jitsi thingamajitsi that can be downloaded to have my own Jitsi server. Good grief, I just want to start a meeting with someone to test things out, why do I have to setup a server just for that? I started to try to find documentation for Jitsi. Some doc pointed me to jit.si but it's a dead link. Some other doc had a nice table of content but page after page merely says Welcome to Jitsi with no useful content whatsoever. Talk about going down the rabbit hole! Running into cul-de-sacs on the information highway!
What I should really search for was Jitsi Meet. People wrongly associate terms with the actual things themselves regularly, either because they are too familiar with the product, or just ignorance. I've heard users refer to Google Chrome, the web browser, as just Google. It dries me nuts! The best thing I could have done, assuming I had the exact info handy, was to go straight to https://meet.jit.si/ . Jitsi Meet's approach is a bit different, in that you just enter a room name and away you go. The Jitsi Meet web site has some code running that makes up random room names for visitors to use. I was initially lost and used one of those random names just to see what's going on. The thing is just click in the box where the name is being generated and make up your own name then you are all set. Note that there is no scheduling capability. You just create the room on the fly, when everyone gets out, the room disappears. Past room names are remembered by the web browser or smartphone app, so the room can be created anew when needed In a way it looks like the meeting can be scheduled, but it's really not.
Once in a meeting, things are not that much different than Zoom or other videoconference web sites. You can mute yourself, mute participants if you are the host, blur the background, start a chat, the usual stuff. End-to-end encryption is in beta but that makes Jitsi Meet attractive security-wise. You cannot setup a fancy virtual background, so it's a minor loss. (Ironically, just the other day I spent much time cobbling together a process to make fancy video of names of Zoom participants. Now the video is useless for these Jitsi Meeting.)
On a computer, you truly don't need any software. I discovered later the chat client I downloaded is Jitsi Desktop. It has little to do with the videoconferencing capability of Jitsi Meet. Jitsi Meet may be a side project of Jitsi Desktop, but for the average user pretend you never heard of Jitsi Desktop. Just go straight to meet.jit.si . Likewise, you don't need to install any server software if all you want to do is host or attend a meeting. The server stuff is for the Linux platform anyway, like Debian or Ubuntu. I don' care what the Linux gurus say, the average user doesn't need to know about Linux. One more time, meet.jit.si is all you need. You do need to setup a name before you can participate in a chat, but that's the extent of "setting up" to use Jitsi Meet on a computer.
On a smartphone, you do need to install the free app. It's straightforward, nothing to stress about. In case you somehow have to type the name of the meeting, it is case-insensitive, i.e. case doesn't matter. I was worried since Jitsi Meet is open-source and since there was mention of Linux and Unix, a world where case matters, that Jitsi Meetings are case-sensitive also but luckily it's not.
Jitsi Meet is a very viable alternative to Zoom. I got free minutes from Zoom before, I don't know what algorithm determined that, so it's possible your Zoom meeting is long enough to get things done. However, if you don't want to worry about time-limit and can live without the convenience of having a schedule, or the fancy virtual backgrounds, Jitsi Meet is a natural choice, especially for those mindful of spending money.
08 June 2020
MAKING OF CUSTOM, FANCY-NAME VIDEOS
May someday someone will write a program that lets you type in a word, then animate it in some fancy way, save the animation in some video formats, and finally combine a few of such videos into a longer one. Maybe it already exists but I just don't know about it. It may cost a lot of money or may be totally free. I do have my own process and it only costs me the price of buying AmigaForever.
It is not a pretty process but it works for me. To review, this is one example of the end product of my process, just a couple of names written in some fancy way:
The first step is to make the animation in PersonalPaint (PPaint), a paint program for the Amiga platform. I run E-UAE emulator on my Mac and make use of the necessary Amiga programs and such from the AmigaForever package. The Amiga platform is blessed to have these AnimatedFonts created just for the platform. I think Adobe AfterEffects may have something similar, but I don't have the money for Adobe products. The AnimatedFonts may have been created originally for the DeluxePaint program but PPaint also supports them. PPaint takes the tedium out of using the AnimatedFonts by using ARexx, a scripting language for the Amiga, based on the standard Rexx. You select the crown icon (rex = king), choose the proper script and fill in some parameters then execute the script. In my case, I use only the Animate Text and the Save to GIF scripts. The Amiga platform has its own AnimBrush animation format that most of the rest of the world doesn't care about, so to have the product used outside of the Amiga platform it's necessary to convert the animbrush files to the animgif format. Name by name, I would write them then convert to animgif. I find that having each frame set to 10 and the last frame set to 60 show the animation at a reasonable speed. I also do not use Transparency so that the animation appears on a black background instead of a white one.
Animgif files are great but for my purpose I need something in a video format. I cannot recall if I spent much time researching but my conversion tool of choice is via the web site EZGIF.com. There are many tools to slice and dice animgif files but to me the most useful is converting them to MP4. As soon as I click Save, the MP4 comes down with some default name. I would go into my Downloads folder and rename the file to match the name from the animgif.
Not too long ago I finally discovered the joy of using iMovie. It was a natural progression to try to use iMovie to compile my various MP4 into one nice movie. Alas, that's not the case. For some reason, some MP4 wouldn't play properly. Instead of starting from the beginning they would start somewhere in the middle and ends somewhere else near the end. The files would play fine in VLC or QuickTimePlayer, they just don't play well within iMovie. I also tried the free Spark Editor from Adobe, same result. Very weird. Luckily, I stumbled upon ClipChamp.com and it works like a charm. The interface is very similar to iMovie, maybe it's just a standard thing. You can even add generic music and other effects but I decided to keep things simple and only use ClipChamp to string the various MP4 files into one movie. Exporting the movies at the lowest resolution is free and that's by me.
There you have it, quite a process but it works:
It is not a pretty process but it works for me. To review, this is one example of the end product of my process, just a couple of names written in some fancy way:
The first step is to make the animation in PersonalPaint (PPaint), a paint program for the Amiga platform. I run E-UAE emulator on my Mac and make use of the necessary Amiga programs and such from the AmigaForever package. The Amiga platform is blessed to have these AnimatedFonts created just for the platform. I think Adobe AfterEffects may have something similar, but I don't have the money for Adobe products. The AnimatedFonts may have been created originally for the DeluxePaint program but PPaint also supports them. PPaint takes the tedium out of using the AnimatedFonts by using ARexx, a scripting language for the Amiga, based on the standard Rexx. You select the crown icon (rex = king), choose the proper script and fill in some parameters then execute the script. In my case, I use only the Animate Text and the Save to GIF scripts. The Amiga platform has its own AnimBrush animation format that most of the rest of the world doesn't care about, so to have the product used outside of the Amiga platform it's necessary to convert the animbrush files to the animgif format. Name by name, I would write them then convert to animgif. I find that having each frame set to 10 and the last frame set to 60 show the animation at a reasonable speed. I also do not use Transparency so that the animation appears on a black background instead of a white one.
Animgif files are great but for my purpose I need something in a video format. I cannot recall if I spent much time researching but my conversion tool of choice is via the web site EZGIF.com. There are many tools to slice and dice animgif files but to me the most useful is converting them to MP4. As soon as I click Save, the MP4 comes down with some default name. I would go into my Downloads folder and rename the file to match the name from the animgif.
Not too long ago I finally discovered the joy of using iMovie. It was a natural progression to try to use iMovie to compile my various MP4 into one nice movie. Alas, that's not the case. For some reason, some MP4 wouldn't play properly. Instead of starting from the beginning they would start somewhere in the middle and ends somewhere else near the end. The files would play fine in VLC or QuickTimePlayer, they just don't play well within iMovie. I also tried the free Spark Editor from Adobe, same result. Very weird. Luckily, I stumbled upon ClipChamp.com and it works like a charm. The interface is very similar to iMovie, maybe it's just a standard thing. You can even add generic music and other effects but I decided to keep things simple and only use ClipChamp to string the various MP4 files into one movie. Exporting the movies at the lowest resolution is free and that's by me.
There you have it, quite a process but it works:
- PersonalPaint either on a real Amiga computer or an emulator. The nice thing with the emulator is the resulting GIFs are on the host computer. You don't have to worry about getting them off an Amiga computer to some web-enabled machine to use the online tools mentioned.
- EZGIF.com to convert the animgif files to MP4
- ClipChamp.com to combine the few MP4 files into a bigger video. I was able to combine nine video files, they are short to begin with though.
07 June 2020
FREE CUSTOM ZOOM BACKGROUND VIDEO
Free is good, right? I have had my share of receiving free stuff from the Internet, yes they do exist. Here's my little gift to the Internet in general.
I have a need to show a video with the names of members of my Zoom workout group. We are not supposed to run together any more, so we meet over Zoom. We each do our own thing, be it treadmill, running-in-place, exercise bike, elliptical, or even actual running on the street. I've been using my StravaArt as a static background picture and want to step up my game. The process is rather involved but here's the offer: provide me a series of names and for each name I will make a video with the fancy AnimatedFont shown in the second video. I then connect all the individual videos into one long one that you can use as as virtual background video during Zoom meetings. Or whatever use you can do with a video, it'll be just an MP4 file. There is a limited of six AnimatedFonts available, but the way they are written can add a little variety. Left to right or simultaneously. Also right to left if you really want to go that far. Just leave a short list of names, say up to ten, optionally specify the font for each name and the way the name is written. I'll reply with a link to my Google Drive where you can download the MP4 file.
I'll get into the nitty-gritty details about making the videos in the next post.
I have a need to show a video with the names of members of my Zoom workout group. We are not supposed to run together any more, so we meet over Zoom. We each do our own thing, be it treadmill, running-in-place, exercise bike, elliptical, or even actual running on the street. I've been using my StravaArt as a static background picture and want to step up my game. The process is rather involved but here's the offer: provide me a series of names and for each name I will make a video with the fancy AnimatedFont shown in the second video. I then connect all the individual videos into one long one that you can use as as virtual background video during Zoom meetings. Or whatever use you can do with a video, it'll be just an MP4 file. There is a limited of six AnimatedFonts available, but the way they are written can add a little variety. Left to right or simultaneously. Also right to left if you really want to go that far. Just leave a short list of names, say up to ten, optionally specify the font for each name and the way the name is written. I'll reply with a link to my Google Drive where you can download the MP4 file.
I'll get into the nitty-gritty details about making the videos in the next post.
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