Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet

Reporting

All three testers agreed: The sound quality on the project's Jitsi Meet server was significantly better than on the self-hosted instance, even though their own server had enough power under the hood. Firefox 41.0 was a bit awkward in Ubuntu on the client side, whereas it was a bit more cooperative in Linux Mint. Participants with the Mozilla browser were often left with nothing. For example, the third conference participant disappeared several times as soon as the second visitor left the meeting. The moderator couldn't see or hear the third participant – only the second guest could see and hear everyone else.

The video quality often left a lot to be desired. Only the tester connected via VDSL was generally satisfied. The first participant (cable) and the second (DSL) at times had very pixelated images of each other. The first visitor's image froze several times for the others despite a high-speed Internet connection.

All the computers found it difficult to work with the supposedly lightweight tool. The OS X computer was under a lot of strain, even though it was equipped with 16GB of RAM. Another computer's Cinnamon interface left the service several times.

Jitsi will only be serious competition to Google Hangout, Skype, and the like when the developers eliminate these faults. The software is not currently suitable for use in professional environments but is fine for private individuals or tech-savvy workgroups.

Even though it's possible to install and set up Jitsi Meet quickly on your own server, the conference tool leaves behind a very moderate overall impression, which one of the testers described as the "VW Effect": The fact that Jitsi Meet shone in a few public presentations might be because of highly optimized test environments.

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