Hello all, I am grateful for the advice I have received here, I am grateful for having found Jitsi and I have been delighted with the product’s functionality and especially impressed with the dedication of the work of it’s developers. We were never going to use Jitsi Meet to run our own instance of Jitsi, it was always to use the public instance. We have tried for 5 weeks, 3 times per week to deliver our Japanese Taiko Drumming classes using Jitsi. A section of our students, even those with huge broadband speeds, have failed to make Jitsi work. I have concluded that it works fine on Macs, but it runs rubbish on MS Windows. We even did a test using 8x8, in case the application worked better, but it was still quite poor. We then jumped over to Zoom and Boom Zoom works perfectly.
We reviewed CPU usage in our tests and saw that Jitsi uses a huge amount of CPU, even with just 4 video windows open. I have a 27" iMac and the cooling fan was going crazy, when we were using 8x8. With Zoom nothing, perfectly clear video coming from the other 3 attendees.
So it is with regret that we will say goodbye for now, or maybe until there is a public instance that is robust and will work properly as an app maybe, instead of a browser version. We know that Zoom displays the same issues in a browser, but for some reason their app/client can manage things better.
Keep up the great work, I will let you know how we get on with Zoom for our next 5-week course, which starts June 29.
Thank you.
Success, M
Update after using Zoom for 4 music classes.
Nobody who has attended any of the Zoom classes have had issues. Nothing like the issues we experienced with using the public instance of Jitsi Meet.
I just wanted the developers to know this. The recording function is also much more superior with being able to record to your local computer. No issues with saying that the recorders are all busy that I experienced frequently.
I hate to say it, but Zoom does have the upper hand on the globe at this time.
Success with all your endeavours and hoping that Jitsi Meet will improve in the future.
Take care and be safe out there.
I am sorry you and your group had trouble.
I’m using Jitsi with three groups. Two of the groups even with a few Windows users and Jitsi is working well enough for us.
In one of the groups a number of people are having difficulties.
I’m operating on the assumption that the developer team does not receive enough high quality trouble reports. So I organized a Jitsi Meet event just to document who had what kind of trouble. We have documented the platform (OS and version), the browser versions, and the nature of the trouble.
It is my hope that if our team and others were to organize such trouble reports, then the developers would have the information they need to eliminate the remaining issue.
Getting applications to run on many browsers with many operating systems in many situations is extremely complex.
If my guess and assessment that Jitsi is merely short of enough quality trouble reports, then I hope I can organize enough people in my community to provide enough such trouble reports to ensure that Jitsi begins to start working for everyone. After participating in two Community conference calls that is what I believe the the shortcoming is.
If I am correct, then the solution is more people joining me in organizing quality trouble reports.
@cjfsyntropy, yes you may be right and kudos for spending the time to report on the issues. I’m not sure that Jitsi is set up for a public instance, it’s more of a private network product, run on your own servers, maybe it works better that way, not sure and have invested hours of time with users to try and get it to work, in the end we had to give up and Zoom works without any issues at all. Good luck!