Jitsi Conference Calls

What is Jitsi?

Many privacy advocates suggest using Jitsi Meet instead of Zoom or other video conferencing alternatives, including the Tor Project:

Jitsi Meet is a secure video conferencing app you can use to chat with people from a web browser, Android, or iOS app. Jitsi Meet supports up to 75 participants at the current time. However, for best results, the development team suggests limiting that number to a maximum of 35 participants otherwise, “the experience will suffer.”

You can work around this limitation using the integrated live-streaming option. Jitsi allows you to live-stream your video conference to an external streaming service, such as YouTube, to increase your number of viewers without negatively impacting on the video conferencing quality.

How does Jitsi compare to Zoom?

Mozilla’s writeup about known security issues and tips how to secure Zoom if you need to use it: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/tips-make-your-zoom-gatherings-more-private/

Read here about Zoom security issues in one reddit post:

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Performance comparison of Jitsi vs. Zoom: https://jitsi.org/news/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/

List of Jitsi instances: Jitsi Meet Instances · jitsi/jitsi-meet Wiki

Live Streaming and Recording a Jitsi Conference

Streaming: Youtube Side

Step 1. Go to creator studio. You normally do this by logging into YouTube, then clicking on your avatar in the upper right corner

Step 2. Go to the Live Streaming section of your creator studio. This should be among the first several options in your creator studio menu.

Step 3. There are two ways you can set up streaming in YouTube:

For most practical cases and especially for testing, you should be fine with the simple “Stream now” option. If you need to schedule an event though, things would work exactly the same on the Jitsi side of things.

For now, let’s just click on “Stream now”

Step 4. This is the last piece on YouTube. Scroll to the bottom of the page, to the “Encoder Setup”. You should see a “Stream Name/Key” field there that is obfuscated by default.

Click on the “Reveal” button and copy the key.

Note: This is probably also a good time for you to notice that the link where your audience will be able to watch the conference is available in the bottom right corner of the page:

Streaming: Jitsi side

Almost there. Start your Jitsi conference as you normally would. If you are in a non-authenticated setup like meet.jit.si you need to make sure that you are the first in the room in order to become moderator and have the star symbol appear on your thumbnail.

Once you are there you should see the live streaming button in your toolbar

You’ll then be prompted to enter your stream name key from Step 4 above:

Next you will see your stream starting:

Note that sometimes this step may fail. For reasons we don’t completely understand at this point, YouTube would sometimes simply not like the incoming stream and reject it. If this ever happens to you, and that should be super rare, fear not. Just retry until you see the following in your upper right corner:

from https://jitsi.org/live-streaming-and-recording-a-jitsi-conference/