Open Source

38892 readers

127 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! (element.io)

submitted 3 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 18 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Nice! So this will replace jitsi for group calling then?

edit:

You’ll still be able to embed Jitsi conferences in Element too - and Jitsi has served us well. However, we want Element to be entirely decentralised and to build on Matrix’s existing encryption, identity and access controls rather than requiring an entirely separate stack for conferences, so going forwards we’ll be focusing on native Matrix VoIP. If Jitsi Video Bridge ends up implementing MSC3401 and speaking Matrix natively we might end up supporting Jitsi as an SFU however - and the story will come full circle!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Very Nice feature. I like how element and matrix are evolving. Features implemented are solid.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

That is literally build into every browser... Call me again when they have e2ee and SFU working.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

What's SFU? E2EE has been working for a long time

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago

Context man. e2ee for the voice/video calls obviously which they say themselves isn't enabled. Although that is a bit strange as p2p browser webrtc is somewhat e2ee by default. Maybe they mean the initial key exchange or so?

An SFU is a server side component that forwards video streams and which is required to have video calls with many people. The 8 they mention with their SFU less mesh calls is highly optimistic, in reality it starts breaking down at 4 participants or less.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

How are decentralized video calls bulit into every browser exactly?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Its called Webrtc. Look it up. It needs a signalling channel to establish the p2p connection so it can't be simply used out of the box, but it is not especially complex to utilize either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

That's just the base to build video calls upon. I'm a big fan of p2p as well, but p2p only limits the number of participants pretty hard. (4 people, yes. 10? Maybe. 50? Nope.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Exactly my point... for it to be really worthwhile Matrix needs to implement a SFU, which is considerably more complicated then just using what is build into the browser anyways.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

Agreed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 years ago

native desktop client when 😠