[teampractices] Hangout alternative: appear.in

[Arthur Richards]

I'm super curious to hear what your experience is like with this.

In my mind, the fact that there's even a 15 person limit with hangouts is a
pain. The scrum of scrums meeting for instance often has about 15
participants, and we've been bit before by the limit. So not being able to
support 9+ participants well is a huge minus.

One thing I really like about hangouts is that I can use it easily on
mobile devices - this is something I'd really like to see in alternatives
we explore.


On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 2:17 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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> teampractices at lists.wikimedia.org
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>
>


-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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