Jitsi Community Reviews and Tutorials, 11 Nov 2019

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From YouTube: Jitsi Meet is a self hosted, open source, free alternative to GoToMeeting, Join.Me, Zoom and More.

Description

Jitsi Meet has both a hosted (free) and self-hosted option. It is completely open source, and freely available for you and your friends / family / teams to use at will. Jitsi Meet is a great alternative to any of the closed source, and expensive online meeting options on the market today like GoToMeeting, Join.Me, Zoom, Teams, Slack, and so many more.

The hosted offering can be accessed anytime at their website:
https://meet.jit.si

Or you can follow along with me and have your own Jitsi Meet setup on a Ubuntu / Debian Linux system in just about 10 minutes.

Instructions are found here:
https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/quick-install.md

This is one of the most simple, and straight-forward install tutorials I've done.

Connect with me:
https://discourse.opensourceisawesome.com
Twitter: @mickintx
Telegram: @MickInTx
Mastodon instance https://youtu.be/8t6Ljvm9IdE @MickInTX

If you'd like to host your Jitsi Meet instance on Digital Ocean, use the link below to get $50.00 US credit for 30 days. That's 5 of the $10 servers that I use for this meeting for 30 days.
https://m.do.co/c/a6a61ae55242

If you need to setup a domain, consider using Hover, and use this link to sign up:
https://hover.com/SHPaiirr

A

Hey it's your open source advocate and I'm back with another video today, I wanted to do a video about jitsi meat. So if you've ever used something like GoToMeeting or some of the other closed source options that are out there, they're, okay, you know slack has a meeting thing you need make a video call with it. Teems does as well. No teams has some nice integration without look because it's made by Microsoft I kind of prefer it over slack.

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To be honest, it's got some good, recording things that let you put it straight into a stream and post it, and things like that and I've used it for work, but really what I look for something that I can host myself and in this case, jitsi meat is definitely one of those things that you can host for yourself. So I wanted to get into the installation of jitsi meat pretty quickly. Here, it's really not that difficult. If you go to their github page, they have a quick install that really walks you through it.

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If you're running Ubuntu or Debian, so we will set up a ubuntu box and just kind of run through this. It's really not that much really just letting the installs run takes longer than anything, but we'll go through this. The last bit is this piece where you can actually do a sip gateway.

A

I tried to set this up with my own sip gateway and maybe I'm missing something, or maybe it's because I only have really one extension that works off of that for incoming phone calls for business purposes, but it it I couldn't really get anything to come up where I could call into a number yet so I need to kind of figure out what's happening.

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There might do a follow up video for that, but everything else on here works pretty easily and pretty straightforward, so we'll just kind of get into this and get started here in just a minute. So just if you want to follow along, get ready and we'll do this so first thing I'm going to do is go over here to digitalocean and I'm going to create a droplet just like every week. I'm gonna create this droplet, it's gonna be Ubuntu 1804, we're gonna, leave it as standard, but we are gonna go over here.

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We're going to pick the $10.00 droplet I, don't think it'll run well on a $5, but a $10 seems to be able to do what we need and then standard is fine. I'm gonna leave it on New York, of course pick the place that is physically closest to you. Geojo located closest to you. I'll just give you better speeds, so I'm gonna, leave, authentication here and I'm gonna pick my keys for this machine and then I will give it.

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The URL that I want to use which is meet dot open source is awesome comm, and that is everything we need. We're gonna hit create droplet, so that's gonna spin up the server that we want. While that's running I'm, going to go over here and get ready to add a DNS record. So I'm open on open source is awesome.

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Comm here on hover, go to DNS tab and I'm, going to click on, add a record, and it is an a record and I set it as meet and we will get the IP address here when the digitalocean droplet is ready- and it is so we'll just copy this, and we will paste that right in there I'm going to ask it to do it in five minutes and hit start. So that's going so we've got our droplet created. We have our instructions here, so we have to do a few things.

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So I'm gonna open up my terminal and I'm gonna SSH yeah we're gonna paste in the IP address users. My keys will accept the fingerprint and we're in so, as always. First thing just do at update.

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We'll let that update and do the upgrade real quick so that just goes out, gets all the latest packages make sure things installed and up-to-date.

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It's always good to do this before you do any kind of installs on your server just keeps keeps it easier make sure you don't have any kind of surprise updates after you've installed a piece of software that that software wasn't expecting for some reason, so we'll just let this run, and it's done did install a kernel module here, so we're just going to reboot the server and then we'll log back in here in just a minute and we'll actually log in through the actual DNS entry that we made just to make sure that some timing is working.

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We'll just accept the fingerprint and we are back in alright. So first step is to add some repositories, so we're going to go out here and get this command I'm going to switch back paste that in we're going to grab this second one. This is basically to add the key for that.

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It gives us an okay, so that's a good sign and then they want us to do an update again so that we get all of the data that we need easy enough. You don't have to copy and paste. You can absolutely just type these in if you feel like typing them in some of the longer ones. It's just easier to copy them and paste I'm gonna make sure that you're not making a mistake on the spelling.

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I, don't think I need this one, so this one actually is kind of an if something goes wrong, then. So, if you basically get an error up here, you might need to run this command in this case. We didn't get in there, so we're not gonna run it. So when I'm back out of that one.

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So now we've got this installed. Jitsi me so basically, here we go we're going to do. Apt-Get install should see me and then it just has the why flag so that it doesn't prompt us and it's gonna go out and get all the repository information. It's gonna pull down the packages that it needs and it's gonna start installing those things now it does ask us for the host name. This is important, so make sure you type it correctly.

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Then you just hit tab to highlight the okay and hit enter, and here it's going to ask about generating self-signed certificates or using a certificate of your own I'm. Gonna use the generate self signed certificate because in the next step down, they're gonna tell us the command that we use to actually get our let's encrypt certificates, which are great. If you do have your own certificates, though, feel free to just use the down arrow to highlight this one and then tab over to okay.

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I'm gonna use this one, so I'm gonna, just tab to okay hit enter so will generate self-signed certificates. If you don't do the let's encrypt step next and you don't have something available on port 80 for your subdomain, the let's encrypt installed will fail and it will give you the warning whenever you browse to the page, the at least for the first time to ask if you want to accept the certificates, so it's gonna run through its gonna set up some basic operations here and we'll just let it run.

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So it's done running that part, which is great so we're gonna, go down to this next part that says, generate a let's encrypt certificate and they give us exactly where the script is stored. So this got pulled down when we pull down the other information, so we're just gonna go here: I'm gonna paste that in we're gonna hit enter and it wants to know my email address, which is fine.

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It's going to go out and get some information and it's going to try to get the let's encrypt certificates for this server, so it actually installs a few things for Python. This is what's going to run the cert bot and make sure things running properly, for let's encrypt.

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So it tells us here that it got the information, so really everything that we needed to do should be pretty much done. If you're going to do any kind of advanced configuration. There's a couple of things here that you can do in a section you can read about that. We're not gonna.

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Do that part and then basically, here's how you open up a conference, so I'm not gonna, go through the Adsit gateway until I figure out more about it, but we should be set so I'm gonna go to meet dot, open source, which you can see. I did this previously to make sure I knew how to run through everything all right, so we're all set up. This is what the homepage looks like. There are some settings here.

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So when I open that up, you can see my camera and you can see the audio, so you can basically go through and set those things up. You can choose which camera. So, if you have multiple cameras or multiple audio inputs, you can choose which ones are. You know for input and output as well as for your camera. Then you've got a tab where you can set up your user and your email address. And, finally, you can choose your language when you're done with that just click OK now.

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The next thing is, you can set up basically just type in what you want a room name to be all this does is add it to the URL up here after a slash, so basically I've got rooms that I've already set up before down here. So if I click away, I'm going to look for I think it's.

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Just-Just my first test: that's the one that I want so I'm, just gonna hit, go.

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And everything's off.

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For some reason, oh.

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There we go alright, don't know why that took a second to kind of kick in, but it did so up here in the URL. You can see that it just adds just my first test. That's just the room name, and then anybody who has this link basically can join, want to turn off the video here, just because it does use up some CPU power.

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So I don't want to create a problem while I'm trying to record the screen recorded the audio and everything else, it shouldn't be a problem, but just want to go through some of the settings here. So first you can change your name. So if you click on it, it'll bring you back to this screen. Where you have the settings.

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If you come back down here, you can manage your video quality. You can go fullscreen. You can share a YouTube video with other people in the channel. Now this one here that says blur your background. I tried this yesterday. It does work, but it did almost kill my system trying to do that. So I'm on an iMac 2011 27-inch we're in a core i5 with 16 gigs of ram. So if that gives you a feel for what I'm I'm working with I believe it's got a AMD video card, probably an older one for sure.

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So if you have a really good graphics driver and some some pretty good machinery, it may work pretty well, but it's in beta, so I wouldn't do it. It froze up my machine pretty hard and I had to come in here and basically unset this setting. So just be aware of that.

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So settings just brings that same screen back up that we've already seen speaker stats, just tells you. When you have a lot of people in the room, you can click on that and see like how much does each person talked. So if you've got a person who hasn't talked at all on a person, who's done all the talking either it's a presentation or something's, really off-balance I mean kind of make. Those determinations.

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Finally, you can view shortcuts, so there are on-screen shortcuts that you can use to control a lot of these things and they're pretty handy. So if you want to mute the mic, you would use M and then M to unmute V to turn off video and V to turn video back on things like that, so those are pretty handy to see next over is the I button. So this gives you the link that you can share with people.

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You can copy this link and share it out to someone and then you can add a password for the room as well. So if you click add a password, you need to type in the password and then save that password and then people trying to join the room will need that password. So you can't put some security around your room if you need to we'll go back to the tile button here in just a minute. Of course, you can turn your camera on and off.

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You can hang up the call, mute or unmute your microphone and then on the left side. We've got basically chat. So, as you come into the chat, if you haven't set your username it'll, ask you to do that first, but once you've done that you can start typing a message like hey there and it shows up in chat. You can close the chat window down and if somebody does put in a chat, you can set up notifications to see those things and, and the system will ask you to allow notifications inside the browser.

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You can raise your hand. So this is to get the attention of a presenter basically without interrupting them audibly, and then you can just click it again to unraised the hand. And finally, you can share your screen. So on my iMac, this is great. It shows you one screen that you can share here. You can choose an application, and here you can choose tabs in an application.

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But when I do this on my setup with dual monitors, it always defaults to do both monitors and I can't get it to only do one I'm, not sure what the deal is and maybe the graphics driver. It may be something else, but just be aware of that.

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If you do need to, you can switch over and just do a single application, if that's all you're trying to share so cancel out for now, all right, so I've got my wife, she's gonna join me real, quick for this meeting, so you can just kind of see what the cameras look like whenever somebody else comes on so here I am she's, just gonna click in and join real, quick.

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There she is so if I go down here and I click on tile mode, you can see it looks like there's three people in the meeting, even though there's not she's in there somehow twice, that's pretty interesting.

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Now there it went so one of them hung up. So there's the other one that actually has her in the meeting and then, if I go back out of tile mode, you can see there. She is because that's the person I'm talking with that's the one that gets the main portion of the screen and now she'll just hang up and be done with the meeting.

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And that's it! It comes back to you and once you hang up, you go right back to the main screen and everything is back to normal and you can create another room. You can use the rooms that you've had in the past they've just recently added this little list of rooms. You've used in the past kind of like this. It's pretty nice makes it easy to go back to a room you had previously, but this is jitsi and and jitsi meat. Basically, it's really a super easy thing to host and something nice.

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If you want to have something especially internal to your organization or a place where you meet that you're, that you're in control of they do have some recording that you can set up some of it's through Dropbox. That's not my favorite, the other way to do it.

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It looks like you have a second server set up just to do the recording also not a great way to do that so I'm kind of looking into that look into the options, but you can always use a screen recorder, but you don't get the audio from the other person always especially, if you're using headphones to kind of keep the audio from interrupting other people. So I'm not sure how well those things would work.

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It would get your audio, of course, but I don't think it would get the audio of the other people in the meeting so I'm, looking into the other options that they have for actually recording the meetings, but I really like this jitsu me too great. The other part about it is, if you do want to use their online hosted version meet GSI.

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They offer that completely at no charge. They have a really great angel investor kind of backer that basically pays for that and pays for that cost. So it is a pretty nice service so be aware that that's out there, but if you ever want to run this yourself, it's really easy, and this is a $10 a month. Droplet.