pyrite VS ion-sfu

For more interesting related projects, you may also want to checkout https://github.com/pion/awesome-pion

I'm fiddling now and then on an alternative conferencing frontend(Pyrite - https://github.com/garage44/pyrite) for Galene(https://galene.org), which is a SFU that uses Pion.

It would really help if the author had a list of "features" on the github project. It is a bit difficult to figure out what exact functionality the project supports.

* https://github.com/garage44/pyrite/

Teams only show 4 streams at a time on Linux, the video/audio quality is mediocre and the video quality in the webclient is worse than the one using an Electron container, probably to force the app. Screensharing always tends to get stuck after a while, and they ignore any requests to start supporting Wayland, even while it takes minimal changes(update Electron).

Nowadays it's easy to setup your own conference server, and use webbased clients that don't require yet another Electron container. For instance, Galene(https://github.com/jech/galene) is an excellent resource-friendly SFU built on top of Pion(Golang).

Shameless plug: I'm the author of Pyrite(https://github.com/garage44/pyrite), an alternative WebRTC frontend for Galene

There's nothing particularly difficult on the server side — a quality SFU should be capable to handle on the order of 400 video flows per core, and there are quite a few high-quality free software SFUs available (Janus, Jitsi, ion-sfu, livekit, Galene). To give some perspective: we're using Galene for lectures, and our single-CPU server uses around 40% CPU usage in a room with 120 students (who keep their cameras switched off during the lecture, of course, and only occasionally switch them on to ask questions).

As the grandparent mentioned, the problem is the client side. Since there is no standard videoconferencing protocol, every free software project needs to develop their own clients. And it's difficult for a free software project to have the manpower and expertise to develop quality clients for the web, Android and iOS, so in effect what we currently have are mostly half-baked web clients.

There is some hope, though. The IETF have been working on standard protocols for ingress (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/wish/), and if their protocols get deployed, you'll be able to use the same streaming software (think OBS) or IP camera with multiple distinct videoconferencing servers. An interoperable interactive videoconferencing protocol is nowhere near, but as more people understand videoconferencing technology, there is some hope that people will get together and start working on multi-protocol clients (remember Pidgin?).

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Galene (https://galene.org), and I've been actively participating in the Pion community (https://github.com/pion/webrtc) and collaborating with the authors of ion-sfu (https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu) and LiveKit (https://github.com/livekit).

go get: module github.com/pion/ion-sfu@upgrade found (v1.10.8), but does not contain package github.com/pion/ion-sfu/cmd/server/grpc/proto

Really appreciate that they have a Protocol project, really helps quickly get a sense of what's under the hood. It's just a bunch of protobuf messages, but that's a super helpful reference, and nice to not have it embedded in one of the various other projects: https://github.com/livekit/protocol

Notably using the well known extremely well reputed super battle hardened Pion sfu, ion: https://github.com/pion/ion-sfu