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.
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
@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.
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.
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.
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 ??
doesn’t the signaling server just help setup the connection between the clients? From my understanding it’s the bandwidth that is the issue when trying to add more people to the video conference. Unless I’m missing something?
Dear All, I completely share the concerns and some disappointment from the NC Talk/video conferencing implementation. Our experience:
due to all these problems (non-stability/low reliability of NC Talk conferences with 3+ participants), we moved to Apache Openmeetings 5 + kurento media server (docker installation) + our own TURN (coturn) + nginx. Great performance, small bandwidth usage for 6-7 participants ( still to test larger meetings) ; Big difference compared to NC Talk.
we still hope for and believe in NC Talk though; we like the phone App and the simplicity of the Talk functionality; We miss the option to customize the band-width usage ( which exists in Apache Openmeetings) . As a general setup, we are running NC18 + own TURN server (coturn) ; We did set a signaling server according this post https://meetrix.io/blog/webrtc/how-to-setup-a-signaling-server.html . The signaling server seems to work OK ( tested as specified in the post), BUT when we set it up inside NC Talk, Talk stops working - connection is not possible ! Still investigating the cause, we believe there is an issue within NC to use external (non NC) signaling servers.
All these issues ( + some other NC issues related to NC file access right control, etc), prevent us to really deploy NC as a production environment and as a real collaborative cloud environment tool. ( We are an NGO and we do a lot of out-of-office, on-the-go activities). Hope NC will get better, and this is why I am sharing our experience here
BTW, Apache Openmeetings 5 is HTML5 based and compatible with some Android browsers too, which makes it useful on smart phones nevertheless there is no Android /iOS app for it… Hope this is useful …
I faced the same issue. Installed an external signaling server - but ones configured nc using the external one it stops working.
Answer form nextcloud:
I asked for an offer: about 5000€ p. a. for the Talk license for 50 Users
Way to much for us
When it comes to scalability of the nextcloud talk sessions without the MCU (High Performance Backend Server) it seems that it is very limited. I read that the talk js client decodes and encodes the traffic locally and send it directly to the other peers. That is what is causing issues by the most of the peoples here IMHO. (https://github.com/nextcloud/spreed/issues/906) - This is from 2018, didnt know if something significantly changed.
If we look at jitsi, it is using a MCU / SFU for meetings > 3 peoples, which is why this performs much better.
Personally I am also a bit sad about this, because we use talk - in the time of corona quarantine - as a regular meeting point for up to 15 people. And I couldn´t find any in detail documentation about traffic flows and such stuff.
IMHO it should be much better if you disable the video in your conference. (or a low amount of people only have video)
As @jospoortvliet said on Github, Nextcloud Talk only supports their proprietary High Performance Backend and no alternative Signaling Server. The cost of this package is highly prohibitve sadly and puts Talk at a significant disadvantage over the selfhosted alternatives.
Anybody who knows what service Bigbluebutton.org use to handle this signaling server feature in their application? Because you can have (we have tested) more than 20 participiants at same meeting. Do they have this signaling at all?
So … the conclusion is that at the moment, nextcloud closes anyone out there who wants to use nextcloud talk for large interactive web meetings / webinar (“hub” solution in nextcloud talk) but cannot buy their specific signaling service for 5000 €. Then this is a failure for nexcloud as a full-fledged open source solution. What’s Your opinion?
I think that about sums it up. It’s proprietary and cost-prohibitive. Both points that run against what NC is supposed to represent.
If you have one of those set up, I think about the only feature you would be missing is where the chat and calls are integrated with the files UI. Maybe someone out there will make an app to integrate Jitsi or BigBlueButton in a similar way. Or just use Talk for 2-3 person collaboration on files and use the other platform for conferences.
Not just Talk, the same goes for Onlyoffice, their “partner” who trashed them as well. They also have no offers for small and medium businesses that are affordable.
Even “Open Core” company Gitlab moves stuff to their Open Source project now:
