A Sustainable Video Conference System
For many people who can work remotely, now is the time to stay home and to move meetings from in person to (video) conference. We have published our remote working stack for those who look for a sustainable solution for digitally continuing their work.
Good news, one more nice thing is added to this list of remote working stack: a free and open source video conference system. Powered by 100% renewable energy, running on a VM at our Swiss data center.
You can try now at talk.ungleich.ch
Deciding what to use
An important note: we’re an open-source, sustainability- focused IT company. We decide which tools to use by these criteria.
- open-source
- sustainablility
- state of the art
- usability for people with all backgrounds
Cool thing about Jitsi
The underlying technology for our free video conference call is Jitsi. We love that Jitsi has a really cool architecture - it does not encode or decode the video streams, but only forwards video streams so the client does the encoding and decoding. This means the virtual machine that runs Jitsi doesn't need to be much powerful and can stay fairly small.
Go ahead, use it for free
You can have a video call with multiple parties, you can share screen, and you can share video over it. You can use have a conference call with or without video. No signup is needed, you can just use it on the go. We don't track any of your information: we want to enable people to work from home and stay safe, with open source and renewable energy.
Useful things to know
Our free video conference call is rolled out on March 20th and since then we have collected some feedbacks. Here are some useful infos we got from using it first-hand and from the inputs of our users.
- Could show mixed result with video call when used on Firefox. We heard that the great developers of Jitsi are working on this right now and the fix is on its way.
- Users have reported that when one call has more than 12 active videos the quality degrades. In such case turning off the video solves the issue.
- The video quality varies greatly depending on the cleint computer. Computers with more graphic capability shows better performance.
Call as much as you need, and stay home
Use our free video conference to call the ones you need to talk to. We hope this helps your communication in this extraordinary time we're living in.
If you have any thoughts to share, feel free to get in touch with us at our Twitter or Matrix. Wherever you are, stay safe.