[teampractices] Hangout alternative: appear.in

[Erik Moeller]

Heya -

are these advantages significant enough to provide a benefit over
chatb.org? chatb.org is fully open. The biggest drawback I've heard
appears to be the same issue around # of participants due to p2p
bandwidth limitations which it doesn't look like appear.in addresses.
The room management functionality sounds handy but not sure this is
actually an issue in practice?

Look forward to hearing more experiences with this and other systems.

Erik

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 1:17 PM, Sumana Harihareswara
<sumanah at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> http://appear.in/ is a WebRTC videoconferencing site hosted by Norwegian
> telcom Telenor. It works absolutely fine for people on Linux. Although the
> source code isn't openly licensed, appear.in doesn't require that the user
> install a proprietary plugin, so it's better on that count than Hangout.
> And, like chatb.org, it does not demand a login.
>
> Pluses:
> * ability to "claim" a room, kick people out, etc.
> * not Google
> * public API http://appearin.github.io/ - and they're open to feature
> requests
>
> Minuses:
> * only works right now in recent Firefox, Chrome, and Opera
> * screensharing only works in recent Chrome versions
> * no built-in video capture
> * They recommend keeping conferences at <9 participants, "as this can cause
> the application to crash because of the number of connections being handled
> by the browser. The main limiting factor is the bandwidth of the
> participants, as everything is streamed peer to peer."
>
> I'm going to try using appear.in for more of my ad hoc and 1:1 videochats.
>
> Sumana Harihareswara
> Engineering Community Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
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-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation