Quick note on webrtc: It requires every client to stream video directly to every other client, meaning the amount of bandwidth goes up exponentially with the number of users in a chat. It really really doesn’t work well for video chats over ~10 people, or people on poor connections.
As I said, I work mostly remotely in a large team with daily video calls, we’ve tested basically every video chat client going and Hangouts is the only one that works with big groups at all.
I too would prefer an open solution, but they’re all just terrible for this at the moment! Motivation to write one
Quick added note: We frequently have work meetings with 50 people and use Zoom for the purpose. The free one is capped at 40 minutes, commercial is unlimited. Zoom works exceedingly well even at scale and has commercial-like features even in the free version.
I suspect the 40 minute cap is way too short for what we’re talking about but noted here in light of the comments about bad experiences with other solutions.
Looks like Google Hangouts doesn’t really work any more like it used to, anyone up for a test run?
Also thinking it would be good to have a tour of one workshop by a participent, would anyone be up for volunteering?
Anyone else going to join? There were a lot of people vocal about not having access to the OWL event online, and now I’ve organised this there is only 3 people signed up to attend and they’re not even the same people.