Streaming for UNA Cloud
@Andrey Yasko has the UNA Team started making any plans to provide additional Streaming options for people on UNA Cloud?
Streaming was going to be a vital plan for my site where people could plan events, tutorials, educational services and make money which in turn would support the site for future projects like better UI experience; and new innovative mods that would make my site unique. Most people have made their niche sites already centered on a subject matter and that's perfectly fine. I could do the same but switching your target audience is not a good thing. My idea of my site may be trickier to implement but I know it can be done within the bounds of UNA. When navigating the best social networks a user wants to keep around it has to be something different that other social networks lack or don't have. Many of us do not have huge budgets wich is why a self sustainable site is needed for growth. Also I think there should be a way for UNA messenger to be available for UNA Cloud members that comes with the Jitsi watermark removed. Most of us UNA Cloud members have to rely on UNA Team to configure certain mods but now have been locked out unless we pay hundreds to thousands of dollars. This is disappointing for long time UNA members. While it's great to be updated on fixes etc it would be good to also know about future implementations and how UNA will tackle the Streaming service for UNA Cloud members. I supposed I can get some other server for it wich means I will be paying for two servers for one site with two different companies to go back and forth in case of technical difficulties 💁♂️
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Thank you for asking, Will! There are two types of streaming in UNA: video chat in Messenger and live streaming via Streams. Video chat uses peer-to-peer connection and only requires a server for the initial handshake, while Streams requires a streaming server to be set up.
Currently, we use Jitsi for the connection server for video chat and Oven Media Engine for Streams, but it can be challenging to run both on the same server, especially for lower-tier UNA Cloud specifications. To simplify the setup, we offer the option to connect to separate media servers through services like AWS or Linode, but this can be complex and requires an elastic solution that can scale up and down with the number of active streams.
In the future, we plan to launch "UNA LIVE," a media processing service that integrates directly with UNA Cloud and charges based on usage. This will be a good solution for early stages until you are ready to deploy your own streaming stack.
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Comment by unknown is hidden. -
The server for Jitsi will be available this year. Also OME will be available on-server without transcoding on all Cloud accounts. For anyone needing transcoding and dedicated streaming instance there's option to use external server via AWS for example, but our solution is likely to be closer to 2024 due to complex scaling architecture.
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hello friends,
we had some live web conference experiences during the pandemic. After some (may be many :) ) failures let me share my experiences and the working solutions:
- after doing some not good resulting setups we needed to seperate the lecturers and audience because if there are any problems with the server (attacks, nasty people) where many audience are this effected the all presentation.
- for this we moved the lecturers out of the jitsi conference rooms to melonapp.com (web based streamyard like app up to 10 speakers at once, with graphical tools to put banners, titles, intro videos etc.)
- for the audience we setup custom jitsi servers like 16 GB RAM + 8 vCPUS, each may host up to 150 clients even to 200, but my recommendation is do not go on the limits.
- with jitsi server all settings are optimised for audience role, all notifications are closed (very important), everybody joins muted and cameras closed on default. On each server you need an admin to take care of the problems.
- We first tried to broadcast to youtube from melonapp and play it in jitsi conference rooms with youtube embed function of jitsi. But this caused problems for the people who joined after the broadcast started-actually they didnt see the youtube video on jitsi room.
As a practical solution we setup a transfer server which will take the broadcast from melonapp to jitsi conference rooms. In our set up we came up with a minimal linux desktop + remote desktop + chromium/google chrome. On this server we used the screen share feature of jitsi conference room within chrome and share the melonapp broadcast to jitsi conference rooms. This server needs a lot of CPU power add as much as you may have and monitor it during the event. (we used cloud servers that we can inflate and shrink instantly from upcloud.com
with this setup there is no limit on scaling we did conferences up to 1000+ online participants.
there are some disadvantages of this setup:
- The audience needs to feel that they are in the same room with the lecturers -"joining the conference"- . This setup does not fully provides that feeling.
- if they need to ask questions to the lecturers, they write in jitsi chat and your admins in the rooms transfer these to the broadcast room (melonapp in our model). If they want to ask the questions with camera we invite them to the lecture room. Not too bad :)
- you need strong servers
- you need rules to manage people, like closing the cameras and mics when not used to reduce server loads, expecting the responds to the questions at the end of the programs etc.
If you need only up to ~80-100 participants in a jitsi conference room, you may even have the lecture from there too, but we tried this many problems are happening, like opened microphones of the others etc. People continuesly logging in and out to hack the system. (if jitsi notifications are open this will easly collapse the system as each notification needs to be distrubited to all) etc.
