Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I’ll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I’ve moved half a country away.
She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don’t particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.
Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it’s possible to set something like a “target” audio quality?
For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:
- host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
- root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)
OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I’d be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other’s experiences with similar use-cases!
I have run Jitsi at work and found it a pain to keep up to date, but your milage may vary.
I have used most video chat things over the last 4 years, the easiest to get into is GoogleMeet. Google also has been the most reliable, I have a GoogleMeet running all day when at home.
Thanks for the suggestion, I must say though, I am very happily de-googled :D
Consider giving MiroTalk a try. It has several versions but the P2P version would probably be perfect for your scenario. It’s free, runs in your browser, doesn’t need an account, and doesn’t have time limit shenanigans. I’ve used it in lieu of Discord calls before and don’t have any complaints.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing. I see it says peer to peer vid chat and works in the browser but I’m wondering if it requires setting up a server or using a public instance, something like that?
Or is it possible for two people to go to the web page and start a vid chat with zero installation or any other preamble?
Sorry I’m away from home so I can’t look into the GitHub page deeply enough to answer my own questions
If you use the public instance you don’t need to set up or host or install anything. You can selfhost it if you want, but the public instance works just fine.
One person goes to the web page and starts a room. The other can join the same room by knowing the name of the room. (It will generate a link when you create a room to make it easy to send to someone so they can join by just clicking the link.)
Thanks for the recommendation! Looks like a great option. Actually, the p2p aspect prompted me to have another look at the Jitsi docs, and lo and behold, there’s an option for that, as long as no more than 2 people participate in a chat… (The reason I’d prefer Jitsi is actually just that NixOS comes with options for jitsi out of the box, for Miro I would have to introduce containers into my setup :D)
Nextcloud may be a bit overkill for your use case, but it does have a very good video chat function. It’s also pretty easy to deploy as a snap package or with the AIO docker image. A downside is that the other person has to have an account on your instance and log into it to join a call. However this is not necessarily difficult to arrange.
I’ve ran jitsi for 4 years now. You can keep your personal variables in an environment file that doesn’t really change and pull down a new compose file whenever you want to update. Ever since the switch to docker from native install it has made things much easier to maintain. I’m using a lxc with debian 12. 4 cores and 4gb ram. The only reason I’ve allocated that many resources is because we use it to record a podcast with anywhere from 4 to 10 people on the server at a time. As far as bitrate, resolution, etc, that’s all handled within your env file. You’d have to look at the docs to see what’s available for you to choose from.
Tangent, unsolicited:
Music lessons over video call, that has to be a real pain. I can’t find it now, but there’s an Adam Neely video where he talks about why online recording sessions can’t work, as transmission latency works against the immediacy needed to play music together. He said it better than I can.
Except if your idea is to play in turns, but then capturing the thing you want to show… Can’t you find another teacher closer to you?
I took lessons over zoom for years, and it works fine. Is not a recording session, you don’t need to play together.
Yeah, I am havong mixed feelings about this. But at least during Covid, it was apparently the norm, so it must work, somehow…
I could find a teacher closer to me, but for one thing, I only have a boke available, and biking ~10km with the cello on my back is not something I look forward to doing on a regular basis. The other thing is that I consider this teacher a friend, she’s given me lessonsfor more than a decade in the past, and I know we vibe well together.
