Remote Working: Conferencing Services

Today's post was going to be about SIP over TLS and Secure media but I decided this was more important to release as soon as I could. With more and more countries locking down their borders and encouraging their citizens not to meet in person we're seeing a huge rise in popularity of conferencing services but what options do you have to stay connected with friends, colleagues, teachers and family?

WebRTC apps drive communication around the world and now more than ever before, we need freely available communications services. So here are some of the ones available to you to go and use without any setup, as well as some others you could go and setup yourselves for truly secure communication.

Hosted

Jitsi Meet

Join a WebRTC video conference powered by the Jitsi Videobridge

Whereby

Easy video meetings with no login or downloads. Video conferencing with screen sharing, recording and much more.

whereby.com

Free Internet communications

SIP2SIP is a real time communications service for audio, video, presence, chat, file transfers and multi-party conferencing.

AG ProjectsSIP2SIP

Of course there are others that require signing up, a subscription or even downloading an app: Houseparty, Skype, Google Meet, Zoom, Matrix, Facetime and Google Duo are just a few of the available services.

Edit: Whereby requires one of the users to have an account - I've had my account for so long I hadn't realised.

However, if you can, why not remove the burden on the above services and run something yourself? The 8x8/Jitsi team have increased their available instances dramatically just to help with availability - I can't even comprehend how much effort it's taking to keep all of that running the way they are.

If you really want to use Jitsi, there are also community run instances all over the globe! You can find them on the Jitsi Meet Wiki

Self Hosted

So if you have the knowhow and can run something yourself, which projects could you go and run?

Jitsi Videobridge - scalable open source video conferencing for developers

With Jitsi Videobridge, you can build massively scalable multiparty video applications. Start building your free open-source videoconferencing today.

Jitsi

nimbleape/dana-the-stream-gatekeeper

React based front-end demo for Asterisk’s SFU. Contribute to nimbleape/dana-the-stream-gatekeeper development by creating an account on GitHub.

nimbleapeGitHub

versatica/mediasoup-demo

mediasoup official demo application. Contribute to versatica/mediasoup-demo development by creating an account on GitHub.

versaticaGitHub

If you've got a project which is fairly easy to get setup and it's not in the list - send me a tweet at @dan_jenkins and I'll get it added. If you read this and you're not sure how to get started - feel free to tweet me, I'll do all I can to help push you in the right direction!

Be kind to one another, go and connect with friends, family and co-workers. Keep the economies moving but remain safe while doing so.