Conferencing platform

[alexandrevicenzi]

#34 requires the ability to perform video conferencing in the platform.

There's a need to research a couple of options, as creating one from scratch might be too much for now.

• Jitsi Meet is open source and widely used
• Kaltura has open-source parts, but the conferencing one seems to be for corporate users
• Wowza, Red5, Nimble are not free but should allow video conferencing
• Pion is open source, it has all components for a video conferencing tool but AFAIK no ready to use platform
• SRS is open source, but lacks some components, it's better as a streaming server
• Zoom is a service, content creators could connect their account to Sumé, and all we do is create a room and share the link

Zoom is the easiest option to start with, and might be an interesting one to support, even if not the main tool to be used.
Jitsi could be rebranded to look like a part of Sumé ecosystem.
Other options are more streaming servers and may require more work than just changing UI colors.

The goal would be to evaluate multiple tools, create a pros/cons list and some insights about it.

[alexandrevicenzi]

LiveKit is written in Go, using Pion WebRTC implementation.

I guess my last comment about Pion is not true anymore, someone made a ready-to-deploy thingy.

[rluders]

I was reading/testing the LiveKit and it looks very interesting. I would say that it is probably something worth to consider as an alternative.

[rluders]

I think that the idea to integrate Zoom with the LMS is very interesting. I know that they have some kind of API that even allows you to check if the student was present in the video conference and some other nice features.

Not sure if, we develop our own solution for this is a good idea right now. Maybe in the future?

Saying that having the possibility to use Zoom is a quick win for us. At the same time, I also would like to not drop the possibility to add other platforms for video conference support.

[alexandrevicenzi]

There are two things to consider here:

• We provide our own Zoom account and everyone uses it, not sure how much it costs, Sympla allows that for online events.
• The creator provides his own account, there are limits on the free version, and it's up to creators to use a proper account.

The way I see it, Zoom is nice to have, it will save some time in the beginning, but it's an external service.

In the long term, you don't want users leaving your platform. If we can keep everything in the same place, connected together, and looking the same, it will bring a better user experience.

Setting up a video conferencing platform is not easy, but also not impossible, there are many solutions that can be used from the beginning (Jitsi for example). The biggest issue could be the costs related to running such infra, it all depends on how many concurrent users it would have.

[rluders]

I agree. I think that Zoom isn't the solution, but however, I would advise to look into the two raised points about it, and maybe try to figure out if it could be quick win for us.

It it was possible, and it become a quick win to have it as a solution for now, maybe it worth to implement it in a early stage, otherwise, we should/can keep our focus to use LiveKit (that IMHO seems very nice).