My question relates to how to get Nextcloud Talk up and running, and choice of hardware.
I have a Nextcloud box (snaps, version 13 atm) running on rpi2. I use it mainly myself, but some friends use it occasionally too, however not much.
What i would like are mainly two things:
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Better responsiveness / (better hardware i guess)
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Ability to run Nextcloud Talk, which i understand requires the installation of a TURN server. It all seems a little bit too complicated for me. And i don’t know will it even work on my current setup. I am familiar with this thread, suggesting how to install Nextcloud Talk via server snap. (Although I am not confident my skills are enough to complete the instructions all by myself).
So first I wonder what kind of hardware options would be wise to consider. Price is not the main factor, but performance and ease of aquiring, setup and maintenance are. As I said, I have the ncbox with rpi2, but the performance is only so-so, and that is already without Nextcloud Talk.
ping @nachoparker
Answering myself here, but I just found out about the spreed box. https://www.spreed.me/store/product/spreedbox-plus/
seems like just what i am looking for. Sure, 836e is not cheap, but it does seem to provide easy setup and low maintenance of own nc + nc talk. Was not really clear to me whether it really is a full blown nc server with all the features including file sync. It seems necessary to add an external harddrive through usb. Not much recent buzz or activity written about it on the internet either, which confused me a bit.
edit: it seems the spreedbox ships with an older (<13) version of nc and according to a person i talked to at struktur.de, at least he could not tell when any updates would come. the product itself would ship immediately though.
so possibly spreedbox is not well suited if one wants a fairly up-to-date version of nextcloud?
I am running 2 users Nextcloud + Talk with TURN server on RPi2 here without issues. 1on1 video call at least works fine.
But not sure about snap, how it is configured and performance impact there, as I use a raw minimum Raspbian setup.
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It begs the question, if the nextcloud box indeed can serve two nextcloud talk users very well, then what extra value does the spreedbox for 836€ give. It’s a very nice looking device, but apparently not up-to-date nextcloud server version and lacks storage.
@thomaslp
If it’s only about the hardware/performance, the spreedbox is of course totally overpriced. It’s an Odroid C1+ inside (35$, ARM® Cortex®-A5(ARMv7) 1.5Ghz quad core, 1 GB RAM, not sure if this is much faster than RPi3?) + 64 GB SDcard (64GB U3 available for 20$) + USB WLAN adapter and power plug. You do something wrong if you pay more than 100$ for all together.
In case of spreedbox you pay as well for the indeed beautiful aluminum case, some light effects with special PCB, pre-installed Nextcloud + Spreed.ME and if I got it right 1 year support.
But note that Spreed.ME is not Nextcloud Talk. It’s a dedicated WebRTC server, that has a Nextcloud App as well. Nextcloud Talk is based on Spreed.ME, but the solution finally is different. Of course, you could install Nextcloud Talk and compare both, decide and in case remove/disable the Spreed.ME server.
About outdated Nextcloud: Should be no issue to update it as first setup step .
As said, RPi2 can handle two Talk users, but of course there might be issues, when in parallel files are transferred or otherwise the SBC is in heavy use. When we two users on my instance do Talk chat, we usually do no other Tasks in parallel .
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i finally managed to succesfully install TURN server on the ncbox. now i can do video calls with nextcloud talk. however, the android app UI is a mess and video calls are far from reliable (android client and ios client talking to each other on different networks). for example it just seemed impossible for me to answer a phone call, but the other way worked some times; i could call the other (ios) client. in this regard, signal messenger worked much better.
@MichaIng your comments are spot on, thanks! even if i still find the rpi2 a bit too performance-limited, the issues i had with talk on nextcloud box did not seem related to underwhelming hardware. now between nc talk and spreed, my impression is that nextcloud talk is having the edge, in terms of development efforts directed towards it. however I have no knowledge or experience of spreed so i can’t really compare them. also if you were using spreed, how would you go about with your iphone/android? no app for it in the app store apparently.
AFAIK, Spreed.ME and Nextcloud Talk still share the same technical basis, so based on same TURN server configuration you might have similar issues. Some versions earlier, Nextcloud Talk had way less features (chat, screen share and such missing) than Spreed.ME, but now it is similar and Talk is developed very actively. So I see no reason for Nextcloud users to use Spreed.ME anymore. Only you should be able to connect to Spreed.ME with every WebRTC client (there are plenty available for Android), while you can connect to Nextcloud Talk only with its client. But indeed it’s too long ago I used Spreed.ME too be sure about that.
I had issues with stable connection (similar to what you describe, calls working to one direction but not the other) as well, when doing calls on long distances, between Indonesia and Europe. But sometimes it worked very well. Still not sure about the reasons and how to make that more reliable. I think it is mostly an issue with the TURN server, which should be at best connected directly to the web without NAT via static IP.
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