ITSY-BITSY ISSUE WITH JITSI MEET USAGE IN THE REAL WORLD

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...