On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 05:59:12PM -0400, Keith Wright via WLUG wrote:
I don't know what the package is for, but somebody on this list said that it should work just to put the link into a browser, so I plan to try it tonight. I'll reoort back to this list.
I have never used the camara or microphone on this laptop, I don't know if I have used used sound output, it was long ago and might have been a different machine,
Is video chat built into the browser now?
Yes, video chat is built into all modern browsers. They call it "HTML5" and "WebRTC".
What exactly does Zoom or jit.si do then?
It starts up a WebRTC session over HTTPS to the jit.si server using your microphone and camera to send your video/audio, while the web server jit.si sends the video/audio of all the other participants back to your browser. Each participant appears as a small video window in a "grid" on the web page. So the server acts as a "video router".
And what's in that Debian jit.si package?
I haven't looked at the Debian package, but since the server side of jitsi is open source (the client side is open source if you use Firefox or Chromium or similar to access the server), I'd imagine that the Debian package contains the server code. jit.si the web site runs the open source code from jitsi.org. Anyone can run their own web server for people to connect to for creating their own video conference: https://jitsi.org/what-is-jitsi/