Abrowser and zoom

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stearinljus lys
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Joined: 06/01/2019

Hello dear community!
I can not see videos when I am connected with zoom. I use Abrowser. Is that a problem with the browser?
Thanks for your time
Farhad

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

Does zoom even work within web browsers? I thought people had to use the zoom program itself. Also, it violates all of your software freedoms badly, as Jaret said.

chaosmonk

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Joined: 07/07/2017

> Does zoom even work within web browsers?

I have heard that there is a webapp. I haven't tried it myself because so far I have not needed to use Zoom. Although my university is heavily pushing Zoom, I have been fortunate in that my advisor is willing to use Jitsi Meet to meet with me, and that I am not prevented from using Jitsi Meet for the courses I teach.

chaosmonk

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Like the others have said, Zoom is nasty. If you are making a personal choice to try to use Zoom, I recommend using Jitsi Meet[1] instead. If you don't have a choice because you are being forced to use Zoom by your employer or institution, I can tell you that the desktop client does work on Trisquel, but we cannot help you install it because guiding users toward non-free software goes against our community guidelines.

[1] https://meet.jit.si/

davidpgil
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Joined: 08/26/2015

The Free Software Foundation also has a Jitsi Meet server you can sign up for by becoming a donating member[1].

[1]https://www.fsf.org/associate/about-the-fsf-jitsi-meet-server

amenex
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Joined: 01/03/2015

Mrs. L. and I tried out jitsi one day and learned its idiosyncrasies in about fifteen minutes.
I was using my ThinkPad T420 laptop running flidas and she was using one of her Windows-compatible
Find jitsi here: https://meet.jit.si/

George Langford

lutes
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Joined: 09/04/2020

What browser have you been using Jitsi Meet with? I was never able to get a proper call in Abrowser, which seems to be a known problem related to Firefox and derivatives. Either I get kicked off the chat room whenever someone else connects, or we are left with no sound and no video except our own echo.

Someone told me they are using Zoom as a remote teaching tool, they seem to be fond of the multiple group creation option in particular and of all the nice options available for teaching purposes. So I was left wondering how far would Jitsi Meet be from competing with Zoom on these aspects. As far as I know, in the current state of things one would need to combine jitsi for conferencing and some external service like moodle for course material and evalutions.

Telegram is now also offering video, which makes it the closest alternative to zoom but I am not sure how written material can be managed.

chaosmonk

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> What browser have you been using Jitsi Meet with? I was never able to get a proper call in Abrowser, which seems to be a known problem related to Firefox and derivatives.

It is known to work best with Chromium derivatives. The best Chromium derivative is ungoogled-chromium, so that's what I use.

lutes
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Joined: 09/04/2020

Thanks, I will try to install ungoogled-chromium when I can figure out how. Following these steps [1] has not worked. Building from source is not an option since I need to be able to recommend it to non-builders.

Is the Abrowser issue due to yet another Google defined standard which Firefox is struggling to keep pace with ? I need to inquire further into this, it sounds counter-intuitive that free software should be running better on spyware (as free as the software itself might be) than on safer free software.

[1] https://software.opensuse.org/download/package?package=ungoogled-chromium&project=home:ungoogled_chromium

lutes
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Joined: 09/04/2020

EDIT: my bad, install went well after installing curl instead of trying to use wget.

It has that dirty googellian look in it but for the time being this is a fair price to pay for being able to use Jitsi Meet properly.

chaosmonk

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> What browser have you been using Jitsi Meet with? I was never able to get a proper call in Abrowser, which seems to be a known problem related to Firefox and derivatives.

It is known to work best with Chromium derivatives. The best Chromium derivative is ungoogled-chromium, so that's what I use.

Magic Banana

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As far as I understand https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1164187#c89 Firefox 80 (and Abrowser 80 soon) finally solves issues with https://meet.jit.si

Jitsi is not appropriate for large groups. I do not remember where I read a Jitsi developer stating it will struggle with 35 participants. There is a hard limit too. To teach (to possibly much more students), there are BigBlueButton and Apache OpenMeetings, which both integrate with Moodle:

lutes
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Joined: 09/04/2020

> Firefox 80 (and Abrowser 80 soon) finally solves issues with https://meet.jit.si

That is very good news, thanks.

> BigBlueButton and Apache OpenMeetings, which both integrate with Moodle

Indeed they both sound great for the purpose, thank you very much for the links.