Due to the changes in interaction caused by COVID-19 and my parents
aging, I find myself video chatting with folks much more
frequently. In practice this ends up with us using Zoom or Jitsi Meet
on the global Jitsi server. Since this part of my life doesn't seem to
be going away, I've decided I want a privately hosted spot to setup
video chats.

A couple requirements I thought about:

1. Most chats will be 1:1. I'll either be chatting with family
members, or select friends. I'd like to keep latency as low as
possible and where possible use modern codecs like VP8/9 and Opus.

2. I have a preference to host this from home but it's not a hard
requirement. Most of my family/friends should be able to find a pretty
low-latency path to my home server and while I do have NAT4 on my
network, I can open whichever ports are needed.

3. Most of my family will be NAT (home router) -> CGNAT (ISP) ->
Internet.

4. Slight preference for native video software over Web software, but
this isn't a hard requirement.

A few options I've come up with:

1. Overlay Network SIP video calls: Most of my family is willing to
enable an overlay network on their smartphones/home computers. I was
imagining something like ZeroTier being run on their phones/laptops
and then just using direct SIP/IP addresses to make calls. I can setup
"address books" on family machines so that they can dial, say, SIP to
my laptop. This lets me use native apps and ZeroTier should help with
any NAT hole punching is necessary on the other party's end for chatting.

2. Setup a private SFU (Galene, Jitsi Videobridge, etc)
somewhere. This setup necessitates a domain name, publicly routable
IP, and certificates to encrypt the traffic. I'd probably end up using
a box that I know has low jitter to send packets to that's
external. This has the disadvantage of more setup on my part but the
advantage of no app needed by family members if they want to just use
the browser/WebRTC. Most of the SFUs can use ICE to do NAT
hole-punching, and I can host a TURN server on the box running the SFU
to allow tunneling of traffic through NAT if absolutely needed.

3. Use XMPP/Jingle. This gives family members a familiar interface
(like that of any other messaging app) to chat and send video calls. I
could either host the XMPP server locally and run ZeroTier to let
others connect and video chat through XMPP and avoid dealing with
external hosting, domain names, or encryption. I could also run
ZeroTier and run this on an external host. Alternatively, I could
expose the XMPP server and use domain names/certificates to do away
with any overlay networking.

I'm curious if there are any options I missed and what recommendation
y'all would go with.

On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:54:16 +0000, meff wrote:

> Since this part of my life doesn't seem to be going away, I've decided I
> want a privately hosted spot to setup video chats.

I've been using jitsi Meet for about 21 months. A group of us used to
meet once a month to have lunch (all ex university), at the university.
That had to stop two years ago.

I set it all up using global jitsi Meet, but one person was concerned
about privacy. I set up a private jitsi Meet server at home. This was a
little involved, so I wrote a detailed guide (it's hosted on FreeBSD but
of course Lunix would suffice).

Initially I hosted it at home, but my upload bandwidth is only about 2.5
Mb/s, and it wouldn't handle more than four participants.

I now have an AWS instance (free for the first year) which costs me about
a fiver a month. I use it for quite a lot.

--
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

Our family simply set up a private Matrix server (Synapse) shortly
after the Covid pandemic began, and are happily using it for chat,
photo sharing and occasional audio or video calls.
It works perfectly for 1:1 calls, and it needs Jitsi for group calls
(although "native" group calls are coming soon, the developers say).
For punching through NAT, you need a TURN server as well, but that's
quite trivial to set up.
A.
On 17 Mar 2022 23:00:32 GMT
Bob Eager wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2022 22:54:16 +0000, meff wrote:
>
> > Since this part of my life doesn't seem to be going away, I've decided I
> > want a privately hosted spot to setup video chats.
>
> I've been using jitsi Meet for about 21 months. A group of us used to
> meet once a month to have lunch (all ex university), at the university.
> That had to stop two years ago.
>
> I set it all up using global jitsi Meet, but one person was concerned
> about privacy. I set up a private jitsi Meet server at home. This was a
> little involved, so I wrote a detailed guide (it's hosted on FreeBSD but
> of course Lunix would suffice).
>
> Initially I hosted it at home, but my upload bandwidth is only about 2.5
> Mb/s, and it wouldn't handle more than four participants.
>
> I now have an AWS instance (free for the first year) which costs me about
> a fiver a month. I use it for quite a lot.
>
>
>
>

On 2022-03-18, Andy K. <andy.k466@gmail.com> wrote:
> Our family simply set up a private Matrix server (Synapse) shortly
> after the Covid pandemic began, and are happily using it for chat,
> photo sharing and occasional audio or video calls.
>
> It works perfectly for 1:1 calls, and it needs Jitsi for group calls
> (although "native" group calls are coming soon, the developers say).
>
> For punching through NAT, you need a TURN server as well, but that's
> quite trivial to set up.
>
> A.

I like this idea. The UX would be fine too. Thanks, I'll play around
with it.