Web Cam Conferencing Software

My wife would like me to set up on a webcam conferencing software on my sons computer so we can monitor him doing homework. The only problem is that she’s on a company laptop that runs Windows 10. I’m on a company computer that runs Windows 10 also. My son’s laptop is running EandeavorOS(though over Wifi, something I need to work on later via a search on the forum), and I was wondering what suggestions you guys have for software?

I’m pretty sure that Zoom is out of the question because it allows 40 minutes on the free account. Is there a way I can easily set up a WebCam server that can be accessed outside/inside the network via IPaddress:port in a browser? I’ll be using AirVPN so I can easily open whatever ports I need because my ISP does not allow me to access the modem.

You could go with a messenger service that does video calls. Something like Jitsi, Wire Web or Element could suffice.

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Element is a good option , qtox and telegram-desktop are also available
Telegram now offers video calls

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Jitsi keeps popping up during my research, it’s pretty much at the top of the list pending forum consensus to this post. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll play around with it tonight.

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Telegram is really up there in likes on alternativeto. I’ll definetly look into that also.

Qtox is useful if you don’t want your videos to be uploaded to any server and protected with end-to-end encryption for privacy concerns

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Don’t need an account and totally free.

Edit: Works best on non-Firefox Browsers (Chrome, Chromium etc.)

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I’ve noticed jitsi doesn’t behave well on 2+ people conferences, especially if you start to share desktop at some point - but you can set it up to work from personal server :slightly_smiling_face:

Jitsi is looking promising. Tested it on my work computer and my cell phone at the same time. Worked well, video quality not good but I don’t care about that. Assuming it’s because there is no central server running the calls if it’s end to end encryption. Didn’t test audio because I didn’t want to create a feedback loop in my office. Already had enough feedback loops testing Microsoft Teams hardware and software the past couple days at our offices. :pleading_face:

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Have you tried Element? It has a free/open source option and works on all devices and platforms. It is in the official repos.

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I like element as well. It’s a pretty good, E2EE platform. Quite discord like in its capabilities.

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There will be 3 people on the call throughout the entire day. The wife will be at home with my son working in our main office. My son will be in his bedroom at his desk, hopefully that should alleviate connection issues. I’ll be located at work, but I’ll be joining the meeting from my phone as I don’t want to cause any network issues at work. At work, I get about 5 Mbps down and 1 Mbps down on our BYOD wifi and we have 200 Mbps up and down at home. If there are any issues, it’ll certainly be a bottleneck on my end. I could turn off wifi and run off of data on my phone, which I get 11 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. That should be more than enough I think, but cell signal does very day to day.

I’ll be using AnyDesk to remote into my son’s computer to pull up homework assignments unless Jitsi allows this function and I can activate it from my end.

I’ll definitely look into testing a Jitsi server later, either on my Son’s laptop or on my larger tower that is currently hosting my media, music, book server. My server is running Windows 10, so hopefully, Jitsi has server options for that.

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I have used Jitsi during April-May, because I have meetings with 8 to 15 peoples. We had our own dedicated server, but didn’t matter what we tried - also to be in direct contact with the devellopers - it was impossible to reach a basic quality. Sometimes I could have a meeting without issue, and sometimes no.
At the end it appears that the way Jitsi works, it shares it’s resources from the CPU of the computers of the participants, and not from a central server (as Zoom or Skype). So it was enough to have ONE weak link - as an old laptop - to break the quality of the whole meeting.
In June I decided to stop to fight with Jitsi, we closed the server and I am now using GoToMeeting, which works very well for me.
It’s a paying service but not expensive, if you pay for one year it costs 8 US$ per month and you can have up to 150 people in one meeting. Of course you can share screens, etc…
It’s not FOSS. There is no dedicated desktop for Linux but it works with Chrome (or better, Chromium).

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Same experience here.

I can only imagine how 8-15 people would go :sweat_smile:
Purely audio would be fine though.

Not really though, i’ve recently tested it with friend (like 2-3 month or something):

  1. On my end:
    • 2 of my extremely powerful machines
    • 500 Mbit/s connection
  2. On his end:
    • 1 powerful machine
    • 150 Mbit/s connection

Experience was very variable when we connected those 3 machines, video quality was from ok to complete garbage, once someone started to share screen - it all goes sideways.
Server made it little better, but still not perfect…So i don’t think it’s about machine (weak link in chain) or connection, it’s something else in client…

P.S. We’ve tried both Linux programs from AUR and browsers, as well as combinations of them…


I love idea of a program, and functionality is just perfect - but they need to get their crap together :laughing:

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Should be, but from my experience it depends also on how you install the Jitsi server (as strange as it seems). I am not one who did it, so I can’t enter in details but from what I recall, different installation process lead to different issues when you use the software. So maybe your server was installed a different way than the one I used. Anyway, bottom line is that I could not really understand the cause of the issues, it’s all assumptions, and I ended to use another software.

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It’s a well documented bug/fact that a single Firefox user degrades the video experience for all participants in a Jitsi meeting.
My workplace runs a Jitsi instance (with a lot of resources) and the meetings with up to 20 people I’ve experienced ran quite smoothly.

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Did you ever have any iPhone or android users in those meetings with the Apps?

I actually don’t know, could be. It’s just that Firefox is banned and can’t establish a connection even if one tried.