I recall not too long ago videoconferencing was still a novelty. The technology just wasn't there. You can do text chat fine but as soon as you turn on the video option, you can see the jerky motion, maybe eventually the chat software would crash too. Nowadays, I regularly FaceTime with colleagues or headhunter. Talk about a computer in your pocket.
Of course Zoom is all the rage these days, warts and all. Being a frugal guy, I also made the jump to Jitsi Meet to see how useful it is. Free is good, right? No time limit, no registration whatsoever. I even found out recently someone made a tele-health package based on Jitsi. The sky is the limit!
Today I checked out Facebook Rooms, Facebook's answer to all this video-conferencing craze. It's built into Facebook and Facebook is the king of social media, you cannot go wrong! Well, in my particular case, I could use some more participation, but that's another story. There is a limit of 8 people max per room and it wasn't an issue for me. I had only one other participant and his window took up the center of the screen while mine sits in the lower right. Very simple interface - the row of buttons in the screenshot is all you get. Share Screen, See Participants, Mute Video, Mute Audio, and Hang Up. I sure miss having a text chat window, but maybe Facebook figured many people cannot type or spell anyway, there's no need for a texting feature. No background picture or video, either. No background blurring as well. Note the Gear icon in the upper right? That's just Settings, and a bunch of keyboard commands.
I find Facebook Rooms feature-lacking. Too simple. What's with the eight-people limit? I cannot see myself using it again in the future.
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...
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.
