Signaling Server recommendations

Hi peeps,

We are currently testing some setups getting the most out of Nextcloud Talk. We have tested and gotten a TURN and STUN server up and running. Since we want to use more than 4+ users we want to set up a Signaling Server. Are there any recommendations on services you are using now?
Are some of you using EasyRTC and how are you using the settings when it comes to the Shared Secret key? Thanks in advance for any input and recommendations.

Greetings, Sam

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Good question, @endeavorist did you find anything in this regard meanwhile?

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Hi Bomo, as you see no reactions here yet, which surprises me since I would have thought people would be using 4+ users in Talk. But I guess we’ll wait 'till someone has some input.

We have setup EasyRTC and tried working with that but lack of good documentation we haven’t got it up and running yet. If you find any solutions or recommendations, please share. Thanks :slight_smile:

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The server itself can handle a bit more than 4 concurrent users in one session if conditions are good on bandwidth for the clients.

To get loads more and to get it to be really effective an external signaling is required but as you noticed documentation for a third party does not exist. To scale up one solution is to get a talk licence but that costs a fair bit of money so if you are small that is not maybe an ideal solution for you.

I started to look at it myself but due to lack of time i haven’t worked on getting a third party signaling server up and running.

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Thanks for your reply. Since WebRTC is a protocol with lots of options out there, strangely enough there is not much to find on Signaling Servers. And yes, we considered a license, however, we’re not in that stage and trying to solve this issue ourselves since we have server(s) capacity and resources to utilise and therefor want to set it up.

I’m very much interested in this also but have not been able to find anything regarding hosting a external signaling server either. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

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Yes, we are in the same situation and there are no to little (open source) solutions out there. Any findings would be great indeed :slight_smile:

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Definitely interested by this as well.
I’ve been using Talk since NC 14 and it works very well while you are 2 or 3 with a stable connection but get disastrous when there is a bad connection or 4+ people.

At this point, I’m wondering if I would have better results with NextCloud JavaScript XMPP Chat and ejabberd for XMPP and its integrated coturn server.
What do you guys think ?

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Hi guys… is there something new conserning the external signaling server documentation? We use nextcloud talk for group calls up to 10 people… and sadly as soon as more than 4 people connect it gets unstable so we need to reconnect a lot. We are using our own TURN/STUN server and have a strong dedicated root server with gigabit internet connection, so that should’t be the problem.
If someone has a solution for this problem or an good, free alternative, it would be nice to know.

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+1 Same situation here, would love to find a (affordable) solution.

I found a way to deploy a very simple signaling server… https://github.com/simplewebrtc/signalmaster is deprecated but usable… any ideas?

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Thanks for this, it got me a good lead for searching on this topic. I’ll test it but being deprecated could be a problem for me. I did find this post on signaling servers:

https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-signaling-server-not-use-apprtc/

In the comments there someone suggested SaltyRTC, I’m going to see what I can do with that also, it’s still maintained it seems.

https://saltyrtc.org/

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I guess I’m confused as to why this happens. If you look at https://nextcloud.com/talk it suggests you can have webinars and public meetings (large group calls is my takeaway from that) “with optional Nextcloud Talk High Performance Backend.” By all indications this seems to be in reference to spreed, right? It also says it’s 100% open source.

So… shouldn’t the solution to this be to do whatever they’re doing on the paid service with the same software?

I found this guide for integrating Spreed WebRTC in Nextcloud 11 on Ubuntu 16.04. Not sure if any of this is still relevant.

As far as I know Talk used to be named Spreed. Before Talk I was running a separate Spreed instance. For any Webrtc solution like Talk or Spreed to work you need STUN or TURN and signaling. I run Coturn for instance to connect clients behind NAT on a separate server.


For some reason getting a signaling service working is hard right now. Nextcloud does offer a solution, as far as I can tell it’s a secret what they are using. It would be great if they release this proprietary information at some point.

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Well, it’s actually not a complete secret what they are using for their “High Performance Backend”, there is a video on YouTube that roughly describes their stack : https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=5S63Q3Xo8dA

Basically, they must have developed their own proprietary signaling server (maybe based on some framework?), which is coupled to Janus as a Media Server to provide MCU/SFU (centralize the flows to reduce CPU usage and bandwidth consumption) and to a SIP bridge to allow VOIP calls (maybe Asterisk ?).

Though, I think implementing the same architecture requires a lot of work :sweat_smile:

@peats Have you had the time to test SaltyRTC yet ? I’m interested by this project and I would like to take a shot at it.

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I’ve tried their test server, did not work, it broke talk calls, have not dug any deeper yet.

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Hi everyone,
Wanted to know if its possible to integrate something like bigbluebutton which has very good video conf, screenshare and voice facility. used it with Mattermost and worked perfectly. love the concept of nextcloud. just talk is terrible on 4+ staff chat.

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Ooeeee…Yes that’s a great request. +1 here!

I totally forgot about this great open source solution. Anyone feel like integrating this into Nextcloud as a plugin? :vulcan_salute:

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I completely agree on that. This feels unreal. What’s the point with great real-time collaboration-tools if one can not communicate with over 4+ people?!?

So what can a self-hoster do then? People at the Nextcloud IRC said they experience problems on Jitsi too. But according to this post things at least looks a bit brighter than Talk…

Stride, Comcast, Rocketchat and Matrix all either build on or has plugin’s for Jitsi, so perhaps it would be a way to make a Nextcloud plugin for that? But BBB according to some perform better than Jitsi, and as mentioned here it has been integrated before (with Mattermost). Openmeetings might be yet another option…

Gosh, I hope people will bring their good ideas and suggestions here, and that we can find some really reliable video-conference foss self-hosting option. And with Nextcloud integration even better so.

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Also very interested in documentation for external signal server for 4+ users.
It’s weird that not a lot of people had already express their need for good documentation.

And i’m not sure to understand.
You said that it’s not working well with 4 users on the same conversation or for 4 users in the same time (2 conversation with 2 people for example)

Anyway, i hope to here new solutions soon (or good solution for external signal) maybe thanks to integration of opensource solutions… ?

And do you have good documentation about the aim of external signal server ??

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