Open Stack

On Thu, May 14, 2020, at 1:17 PM, Clark Boylan wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 2020, at 10:42 AM, Chris Morgan wrote:
> > We on the ops meetups team had a trial meeting on meetpad.opendev.org 
> > this morning and for the most part it worked very well (detailed 
> > feedback below). Speaking personally, I am very happy to see an open 
> > source solution for video conferencing being adopted by the foundation 
> > to some extent. I had and continue to have reservations about Zoom, but 
> > at the end of the day no matter how well they respond to the security 
> > and privacy concerns it will still be a proprietary solution and no 
> > more true to the openstack tenets than slack is as a replacement for 
> > irc.
> > 
> > feedback
> > 
> > - etherpad integration is cool but several of us found the window 
> > seemed to disappear inexplicably
> 
> It seems that when a call starts the etherpad starts "pinned" but then 
> certain events can cause jitsi to go back to its normal "focus on the 
> person talking" mode of operation. In the bottom right is a "3 dot" 
> menu and from there you can open and close the "shared document" this 
> allows you to toggle the etherpad manually.
> 
> Even after toggling it directly it seems that jitsi wants to keep focus 
> on speakers in some cases. I've been fiddling with it to try and 
> understand that better and it seems like some of these things may help 
> (though I can't say for sure):
> 
> * Click in the document directly
> * Collapse the right hand column of mini webcams using the > in the bottom right
> 
> 
> > - colored highlighting of fragments on the etherpad showed up 
> > overlapped for some but not all meeting members, obscuring some text
> 
> I've noticed this too. Toggling authorship colors in etherpad's 
> settings menu seems to correct this.
> 
> > - background blurring seemed very heavy for some participants computers 
> > and this possibly lead to some sessions locking up
> 
> I believe this is specifically listed as an "experimental" feature in 
> the menu. I expect this is why. Should probably avoid using it.
> 
> > - it's not clear what named meetings persistence is, for example a 
> > named meeting from yesterday is still shown today, but doesn't have the 
> > password I applied yesterday
> > 
> > My guess is some (all?) of this is just how Jitsi is right now.
> 
> Few other things we've noticed:
> 
> * Chrome/Chromium seem more reliable than Firefox

Apparently there is some technical reason for this around how chrom* and firefox handle webrtc video? I don't have the details but apparently this is expected.

Additionally, if you've found that the web browser version is giving you trouble, the mobile (iOS and Android) jitsi meet apps apparently work quite well. Since we're hosting our own server you need to update the settings to point to our server and not the default server, but otherwise people have reported this works well. On Android you can change the server by opening the in app menu, going to settings, and changing the server URL to https://meetpad.opendev.org. I assume its similar on iOS but don't have an iOS device to confirm.

Hope this helps,
Clark