[BozemanLUG] May meeting?

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

I set up a Jitsi server on a Digital Ocean droplet last night... and I'm going to try and use it for the meeting tonight.  Being on Digital Ocean, it should have plenty of bandwidth... and I *THINK* such a setup acts as a video bridge where the input streams from all participants are muxed into a single output stream that is sent to each participant.  Without that bridging there'd be as many streams as there are users... which would be very limiting.

I have pretty limited bandwidth at my house... 4MB/down, 500KB/up.  I'm on a discounted Spectrum plan... AND I have three other people in my household and probably 10+ devices in the house that could be using bandwidth.

Given the quality of my bandwidth (and I think Gary's is about as bad), I don't really expect fantastic results and here are my tips for the 7 PM meeting tonight:

1) While it might be nice to see everyone all the time, I'm guessing it'll negatively impact the meeting so... mute your webcam and microphone unless you are the active person

2) Set your webcam quality for low resolution.  Most of us have less than 1080p displays.  The laptop I use has a max resolution of 1366x768 so sending me a 1080p display is not only going to waste bandwidth, it most likely requires additional computational work to rescale it.  Where do you change those settings?  I'm not sure... but the Jitsi web interface does have a slider for webcam video quality so that's where I'd start.

3) We'll also be in the IRC channel (#ubuntu-montana on Freenode) during the meeting as a backup if and when the video conference goes bad.

4) Screensharing - we will probably be doing some screensharing... and if your display is 1080p, 2.5K or 4K, you are going to nuke the bandwidth.  During the video conference, I'd recommend resizing your display to whatever resolution you have that is close to 720p.

If we have good results, then we can consider upping things or being less resource frugal in future meetings.

The URL for the meeting will be: https://jitsi.montanalinux.org/BozemanGLUG

I have Jitsi requiring authentication to start a meeting and I'm currently the only person with an account... so that URL won't exist until I make it tonight... and only after I have started it, will anyone be able to join.  Stay tuned for a go/no-go email this evening.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]