COVID-19 video conferencing

Posted on June 2, 2020 Updated on June 2, 2020

The COVID-19 lockdowns have brought video conferencing to the forefront of attention for many desktop workers, including me. There is a major selection of video conference systems and the choice is not obvious.

Skype was probably the first video conferencing I tried seriously, – and many years ago. For association board meetings, we are now regularly using it, but usually with audio only and a combination with Etherpad. I am not aware of webinar-like use of Skype.

Skype for Business I have experienced but not used. Danish authorities often live in a Microsoft world were Skype for Business seems to be one of the limited video conferencing options. It has not been possible for me to get it to work on my Ubuntu computer. There may be an Android version that could be installed and used in case of emergency.

My attempt on using Adobe Connect was unfavorable. The number of licenses may have been overwhelmed as I experienced major connection problems the first day of the lockdown for course work. This particular system is using Flash, which I actually thought was dead. The installation was possible but, I my opinion, not recommendable on an Ubuntu system. I have not tried it for anything serious.

For YouTube live streaming, there is a 24-hour waiting time. I have enabled it. I could not be used the first day for course webinar and I have not tried it later.

A colleagues suggest Twitch. Live streaming seems to require the download of an app: Open Broadcaster Software. The use of Twitch in machine learning, programming and university education seems limited, but I may not have looked carefully.

Zoom was quickly rumoured to be a good choice. My university quickly setup a special login with dedicated domain. Zoom would like to have you download a dedicated program. AFAIU chat is not maintained between sessions.

Zoom was in one aspect actually working better than in the physical meetings. The problem of getting connection from my laptop to the big screen in the meeting room is not necessarily a trivial task. Last time it embarrassingly took several minutes to get the signal through. In the online Zoom meeting, the screensharing seemed straightforward. The students could, with seemingly no effort, switch screensharing. However, this was only for an 8-person meeting.

Zoom is currently not the panacea. Recently, I experienced that I could not join a meeting because my version of Zoom was too old. Joining via the browser resulted in very poor audio quality. Upgrading the program was quick, but some audio problems persisted.

A PhD Student at our section affiliated with the local Microsoft company suggested (obviously) Microsoft Teams. Like Zoom, Microsoft would like you to download the  dedicated Microsoft Teams program. Chat is maintained between sessions. This is a good choice compared to Zoom. For video conferencing for a course, subchannels can be made where individual teaching assistance can be provided.

Another PhD Student at our section was affiliated with Telenor and suggested (obviously) Appear.in of the company. It has now changed name to Whereby and another company seems to have taken over the service. Whereby is Norwegian, neat and nibble. It requires less setup than other services: You just point you browser to a specific URL. The bad news is that Whereby is restricted to 4 users. For an emergency where I could not get Skype for Business working, I upgraded to a paid account with a maximum of 12 users and distributed my dedicated URL that the other video conference participants could copy-and-paste into the browser with no further problems, – from my side. There may have been browser issues and one need to try Google Chrome instead of Firefox. The owner of the room controls who gets in. Other users need to knock on “the conference door”.

For the #vBIB20 conference, the organizers used gotowebinar which I also should use for an invited talk. I tested it the day before and it seem to work for me. On the day of the talk, I found out that the gotowebinar link, that I had, was not for the panelist and a special link was required. Searching in the depth of my emails, I found the links, but unfortunately it did not work. A system test for gotowebinar was also available but deceptively reported that my system was ok. The system did not seem to support Linux systems for panelists. The problem seems also to have hit Wikicite colleague Jakob Voß: “Wenn dir erst 3 Stunden vor deiner #vBIB20 Präsentation auffällt, dass GoToMeeting für Referent*innen kein Linux unterstützt“, he wrote on Twitter.

For part of the #vBIB20 conference, the WikiLunch, the organizers used an instance of Jitsi running from a Wikimedia Deutschland controlled domain. Wikimedia Deutschland has continuously shown themselves to be the technically strongest Wikimedia chapter. I had not seriously tried Jitsi before, but the video session seemed – from my part – to work more or less well, both in-browser and screensharing. It was unclear to me how many had joined the Jitsi meeting.

For recording of screencasts, I have downloaded open source OBS Studio. I have recorded my screencasts and afterwards uploaded the movie file to our dedicated university video server.

From the Wikipedia world, particularly Andrew Lih, I have heard of Streamlabs. As I understand it can stream to a range of (“any”?) platform making you less reliant on each service.

Discord I have been introduced to, but not used for video conferencing.

Google has some services. Gsuite mimics some of the Microsoft programs. I have not yet used Google video conferencing, besides Google Hangout several years ago.

A problem with these video conferencing systems is that the dedicated programs fill up the harddisk and sometimes seem to compete for the camera.