On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 5:57 AM, Manuel Schneider manuel.schneider@wikimedia.ch wrote: ...
We use BBB regularly for our staff and board meetings, weekly meetings with 4 - 5 participants. Works great. The biggest issues are people not having connected their mic or adjusted their mixer properly or not using a headset at all, causing background noises and echos. But no solution, neither Skype nor Mumble, can fix that.
Many solutions fix that using echo cancellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videoconferencing#Echo_cancellation ).
According to http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2012/10/15/the-long-journey-towards-good-free-... , the lack of good free echo cancellation code used to be the most critical problem for free videoconferencing software. ("good echo cancellation .... is required in order to avoid having an ugly echo effect when trying to use your laptop built-in speakers and microphone for a call. So people have been forced to use a headset to make things work reasonably well. This was a quite hard issue to solve as there was neither any great open source code available which implemented echo cancellation or a good way to hook it into the system.")
That post goes on to say that the issue was mitigated last year when "Google ended up releasing a quite good echo cancellation algorithm as part of their WebRTC effort." I don't know if Mumble or BBB have since made use of that, though.