Minutes from BigBlueButton committers meeting 2010-08-12

[Fred Dixon]

Date: Thursday, August 12

In attendance:
- Richard Alam
- Omar Shammas
- Sebastian Schneider
- Fred Dixon
- Denis Zgonjanin
- Jeremy Thomerson
- DJP

Planned for 0.71
================

We continue to work on record and playback in BigBlueButton, thanks to
the help of Markos Calderon, one of our Google Summer of Code students
(see post below)

http://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-dev/browse_thread/thread/605ebf4e1bf5b7c8

However, before we push towards a release of BigBlueButton with record
and playback (which will be 0.8), based on feedback we've received
it's clear that some core work on the VoIP is needed first.

Here are the minutes from the developer's meeting.


1. Improve the quality of VoIP

We discussed the need to work on reducing the latency in VoIP. While
there are things that we can't control (such as a participant's
upstream bandwidth), there are areas we can investigate

a. Experiment with different configurations of Java threads for
transcoding audio in red5Phone
b. Use speex in the Flash client (thus passing through the audio
packets untranscoded to a back-end conference server)
c. Use freeswitch as a back-end conference server, which supports
wide-band speex
d. Use a patched version of asterisk that supports wide-band speex
(thanks to Generic Conferencing for developing this patch)
e. Refactor the time stamping of audio packages entering and
leaving the back-end voice conference server

It is unlikely that any one change will suddenly improve VoIP; rather,
it will be a combination of the above.


2. Refactoring the BigBlueButton client

While the focus of this release is on improving the quality of VoIP,
there is an opportunity to continue the refactoring work on the
client.

This refactoring will enable, in a future iteration, components of
BigBlueButton to be used in isolation, such as just using the chat
client in a web page.

Discussion on the refactoring work for 0.71 included:
a. Continue work to decouple modules
b. Finish refactoring to Mate, which removes the last of pureMVC-
based code in the client
c. Add unit tests to bbb-client main app
d. Various UI updates, which include
- Chat is now displayed as a list of objects (which gives us the
ability to tag items in the list, translate them, and other per-
message operations).
- Loading screen now shows a single progress bar
- Branding of UI (see: http://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-dev/browse_thread/thread/08c199bb4f249642#)

We will be providing instructions on how to brand the UI with the
release.


General Discussion
==================

3. API Usage

We discussed how the API is currently used by a third-party
application.

a. end

The current behavior when end is call is that users can't immediately
join the meeting for an hour (this is configurable; see API docs for
more information). The logic is that if a calling application ends a
meeting, then the BigBlueButton server will reject users rejoining.

If the logic should be "the meeting has ended but you want users to
immediately re-join", then the third-party application could call end
and then change the meetingID associated with the meeting in its
database. Subsequent create/join request by the user would then
create a new meeting for joining.

b. Dynamic config.xml (future iteration)

We discussed making the current static config.xml dynamic by adding a
configxml parameter to the join API call. This would enable a third-
party application to dynamically create a config.xml and create
different start-up configurations for moderator and viewer (such as
the viewer is a K12 student and does not need to see the listeners or
users window).


4. Community Involvement

Our bigbluebutton-dev mailing list is now over 600 developers. To
help support this community, we decided to:
a. Setup an IRC and the channel #bigbluebutton on freenode
b. Increase our support for developers who are interested to submit
patches and bug fixes

Some of the developers will continue to hang out at http://demo.bigbluebutton.org/,
but you can expect that most of the core developers will hang out at
the IRC channel.


You can track the progress on the items we're working on in 0.71 in
Google Code

http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/issues/list?can=2&q=milestone=Release0.71

Finally, while we don't give release dates, our intent is that 0.71
will not be as long as the 0.70 iteration (which was fourteen
weeks).

You'll know we're getting close to release when you see posts in
bigbluebutton-dev requesting help testing builds of 0.71. (Keep an
eye out for such posts -- helping testing the builds is an excellent
way to contribute to this project.)

Regards,... Fred

[phamhphuc]

Hi all,

Thank you very much :-).

I am specially hoping to "1. Improve the quality of VoIP". Just need it in this time :). I think this is important meeting and we get so many problems will be solved. Could you please give me the time you will release a develop version with better VoIP quality?

Regards,
Phuc

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[Jeremy Thomerson]

Phuc,

  Looks like we caught you not reading the entire message.  Please refer to the end of the message, where it says:

You can track the progress on the items we're working on in 0.71 in
Google Code

  http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/issues/list?can=2&q=milestone=Release0.71

Finally, while we don't give release dates, our intent is that 0.71
will not be as long as the 0.70 iteration (which was fourteen
weeks).

You'll know we're getting close to release when you see posts in
bigbluebutton-dev requesting help testing builds of 0.71.  (Keep an
eye out for such posts -- helping testing the builds is an excellent
way to contribute to this project.)

Best regards,

Jeremy Thomerson

http://genericconf.com

[phamhphuc]

Jeremy,

Thank you. As you see in my message "develop version with better VoIP quality", not a release version or test version with all function in 0.71. I am very happy if I can help to do something on this issue.

Thanks and best regards,
Phuc

[Jeremy Thomerson]

Well, you actually asked for "give me the time you will release a develop version with better VoIP quality".  The only versions we *release* are full releases, based on quality, not dates.  Of course, you can follow the instructions on the wiki to set up your server for development and try to build from the source repo as changes are committed.  But, we can't offer full support for this type of installation.

Jeremy