Jitsi Meet - video conferencing

[Jason Hernandez]

Hello all!

Has anybody taken a look at the feasibility of getting Jitsi Meet working? It's a free / open source WebRTC video chat.

https://jitsi.org/Projects/JitsiMeet

It would be really nice to take advantage of Sandstorm's security layer and ease of installation (I couldn't get it running locally on bare-metal on my first attempt).

Best regards,

Jason Hernandez

North Star Post

[Asheesh Laroia]

It would be really nice. It's a huge ball of code that would be hard to test on Sandstorm, with features like XMPP integration 

One alternative is https://github.com/srtucker22/quasar Quasar, which is a Meteor app that is a minimal wrapper about WebRTC.

The author tried to package it for Sandstorm and ran into the problem where testing against local.sandstorm.io doesn't really work because it's not a "secure origin" for Chrome's purposes, so it can't use WebRTC. Other than the fact that testing it was hard, I think the app could be packaged very easily. Is that something I can convince you to try doing, Jason, ... ? : D

I'd be happy to help however I can.

I'd also be willing to submit pull requests with suggestions, and to test out your package, and so forth.

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[Jack Singleton]

FWIW I would love to see a video conferencing app on Sandstorm.

Excerpts from Asheesh Laroia's message of 2016-05-23 13:01:48 -0700:

[Nolan Darilek]

Has anyone tested Rocket.chat's audio/video chat integration? Last I
checked, audio was stable and video was beta for multi-user chats.


I haven't because I don't have folks to chat with, but spinning up a
test instance on Oasis, sitting around in a chatroom and calling for
testers would be fairly easy to do. Might be worth scheduling an attempt.

[Jason Hernandez]

I tested the video chat several updates ago and didn't have any luck. I didn't follow up on it any further, but I would be willing to do a quick test.

Asheesh - thanks for the suggestion to look into Quasar. I have quite a few projects in flight right now, so I'm not sure when I'll get started on it. It looks like this might be a pretty easy project to try my hand at packaging a Sandstorm app though!

Jitsi Meet is pretty massive, and it requires Openjdk 6 from what I can recall. I would guess that Quasar would load much faster than Jitsi Meet might.

[Asheesh Laroia]

+1 to all of this.

Also - if there's anyone lurking here on sandstorm-dev who wants to try packaging something, but isn't sure what, let me say that if you want to try packaging Quasar, I will help you out and solve problems until you succeed. So let me know!

[Nolan Darilek]

I just set up a rocket.chat instance and enabled web RTC for public rooms:

https://oasis.sandstorm.io/shared/vIhbJ3GbswPhuHI-TFu-2WRX2dhlBj3E6e1TDGNL6VN

About to head out for the night so can't test, but others should definitely feel free to converge on that and test it out. Or we can coordinate the test there. :)

[Jason Hernandez]

Quick update - we weren't able to get a 3 person video call working in rocket.chat, or even a 2 person call via DMs.

Thanks Nolan and Drew for giving it a shot!

[Nolan Darilek]

1. Did anyone capture console logs to determine if the failure case might have been Sandstorm-specific? Likewise for about:webrtc?

2. Does this work for folks at https://demo.rocket.chat?

In the course of our testing it was discovered that the member list plus the call buttons weren't accessible, so I guess it's another round of a11y whack-a-mole to fix that. That's why I'm asking about this vs. doing it myself. I, too, would love to see a Sandstorm-hostable audio conference solution. Bonus points if it supports chat too.

[Asheesh Laroia]

I'd love to hera about any specific issues y'all ran into.

Note fwiw that there are some privacy-leak problems of WebRTC. These might be A-OK for your situation but I figure I should at least mention them.

WebRTC can be used by the app to ask your IP address. I believe that this issue affects *all* Sandstorm apps, not merely those that enable video/voice chat.

- https://mozillamediagoddess.org/2015/09/10/webrtc-privacy/

- https://www.perfect-privacy.com/webrtc-leaktest/

- https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/WebRTC/Privacy

Also, I believe that TCP/IP packet headers can be used by parties within one's wifi network to determine the IP address of the remote WebRTC peer. I haven't found a great reference for that, but if it's truly P2P then I think that must be true.

All that said, I still personally think WebRTC is useful for Sandstorm users. But for those with special privacy needs I wanted to provide the links above.

[Nolan Darilek]

I tried to replicate this with the intent to capture console logs/about:webrtc info, but I can't. I can't seem to find the members list, below which is supposed to be the audio/video call buttons. In looking at the code, nothing jumps out at me as to why this component isn't appearing. I also don't see it on non-Sandstorm-hosted rocket.chat, so Sandstorm isn't the problem.

I theorize that rocket.chat is appearing in a mobile/small-screen layout on my '11 tablet, despite the window being maximized, and that the button/component designed to make the list appear in this layout doesn't do its job. If anyone has a responsive browser resizer extension and can help me test that out, it might be helpful. Unfortunately I don't have a larger screen to test this with, but I'd very much like to do my part to get it working. It would be nice to replace Teamtalk/Mumble/other heavier-weight alternatives with something that ran in the browser and could be installed in a single click.

[j...@openinternetproject.org]

Let me add a voice of support to getting Jitsi Meet working - in addition to being useful, it also provides SRTP encryption (client-server at least).

[Joshua Warner]

First, I'm all for getting Jitsi Meet working on Sandstorm - so take this with a grain of salt:

On Tuesday, June 14, 2016 at 7:06:04 PM UTC, j...@openinternetproject.org wrote:

Let me add a voice of support to getting Jitsi Meet working - in addition to being useful, it also provides SRTP encryption (client-server at least). 

Keep in mind that vanilla webrtc already supports (and indeed mandates) SRTP encryption with SRTP+DTLS key negotiation, so Jitsi Meet on Sandstorm doesn't add anything to the security picture.  Arguably, it slightly weakens it since with the Jitsi videobridge, data is decrypted and then re-encrypted on the server-side - so a passively adversarial hosting provider could access it.  On the other hand, if just the metadata (SDP) data is going through Sandstorm (as is the case with non-Jitsi, peer-to-peer webrtc), it would require an active adversary to decrypt traffic (i.e. they would have to read and then modify the SDP as it passed through Sandstorm).  The latter is a much higher security bar (IMO), since it's unlikely to happen accidentally - whereas accidental data exposures (which are often passive by nature) happen all the time.

References: I work with Jitsi Meet and webrtc as part of my job.  I built a from-scratch, proof-of-concept SIP/SDP/SRTP client.

-Joshua

[Nolan Darilek]

FWIW, looks like Rocket.chat just gained Jitsi integration in master. Not sure what the status of this is re: releases. I wonder if this setup would have any advantages in Sandstorm for possible video chat, or if it can even run at all.

BTW, there's a bit of discussion about voice chat not working in Rocket.chat's Sandstorm port here:

https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/3487

I know some about web RTC and it isn't immediately obvious to me why this wouldn't work. Wonder if it'd be worth another test with the intent of capturing console and about:webrtc logs?

[22687...@student.iss.k12.nc.us]

On Monday, May 23, 2016 at 3:52:18 PM UTC-4, Jason Hernandez wrote: