Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: T42 on 15 March, 2020, 10:10:51 am
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Anybody know of a good free teleconferencing app or website that'll run tolerably well under Windows Antiquated™ and is suitable for codger[esse]s verging on second childhood? Our club committee urgently needs a confab.
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We are considering Skype. Still digging though.
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My work is recommending Zoom. I've not used it yet myself but must be worth checking out.
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+1 for Zoom.
It is free to use for meetings up to about 40 minutes. Paid version removes that limit. Only the host needs the paid version.
I've had no issues with call quality.
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Cisco Webex - Windows 7 and above
Skype - Windows 7 and above
Zoom - supports Windows XP and Vista (!)
No idea if it actually runs well on the old versions, but Zoom at least claims to support them.
Zoom has made massive inroads into the corporate market, partly by making things easy to set up and use.
I’m not personally very enamoured of their privacy policies, but that’s a downside of any free service.
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Don't forget WhatsApp.
Slack is another useful conferencing tool, which has integrated whiteboard-a-;ike allowing you to scribble to point at thing (which fades after a few seconds)
Skype is the most feature rich public free offering, but it is also flakyy-est
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Skype, easy to use but sometimes flaky
Zoom great but limited to 45 minutes for the free version
hangouts seems to need a business account now but that is probably just me
Whatsapp brilliant
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Thanks, folks. Had heard of Skype being flaky, the others I didn't know about.
45 minutes for our lot yattering would go in the pro column for Zoom. I'll have a gander at it and if we need the paid version the club can pay for it, while it still can.
Cheers.
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We are looking at similar stuff.
I'd preface any meeting with a statement that a national emergency means quick and to the point discussions and decisions. Wafflers out!
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We are considering Skype. Still digging though.
Skype is poo.
Zoom testing to commence asap.
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Been using Zoom with a few people.
I've started a simple game at the beginning to teach people the principle of delay.
OK - one at a time a participant says "One Two Three" and immediately after "Three" everyone else says "Four!"
Every time I've done that the others have said "Oh yes, I see..."
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I now have four different video conferencing products on my work laptop as everyone uses a different one. All of them seem to come with instant messaging too. Its driving me potty.
My company is split across Webex and Teams and then there are the customers ...
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^ this
As a Mac user surrounded by Windows users who claim that Macs are not compatible but then ask me to sort out file types incomprehensible to them, I am accustomed to just getting on with a shed load of different applications - each one championed by one person who hasn't researched the market.
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Facebook messenger seems to work quite well. We had a four-way video 'conference' on that the other day.
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I now have four different video conferencing products on my work laptop as everyone uses a different one. All of them seem to come with instant messaging too. Its driving me potty.
My company is split across Webex and Teams and then there are the customers ...
Yeah. One person likes Skype, another Teams, another Zoom.... family want Facebook messenger or FaceTime...
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Google chat is quite good. We used to use it at my previous place of work. Less dropout if two people speak at the same time.
Whatsapp I've only used calling one person, so can't speak for that.
Slack is ok for calls and video, but no good if you have to share a screen.
Skype works, particularly for screensharing, but suffers dreadfully from dropout.
Teams is just dire.
Try Google chat.
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The mothership is killing Webex at the beginning of July. I can't profess any big love for it, leastways until they forced Teams upon us (we used to have Slack). It's notable that compared to Slack, all the groups and everything that used to exist have now died off or are reaching the defined state of moribund that if they moved you'd shout 'argh zombie.'
Call quality is crap too and in the cost-saving wisdom of the mothership they're dropping dial-in numbers, so it's computer only.
Of course, I get stuff elsewhere in Zoom, Skype, Blue Jeans, Google, blah blah. They all seem somewhere south of intuitive.
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Seems about right:
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CzvsPtWVEAA2hpA?format=jpg&name=small)
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Has anyone mentioned that Zoom tells the conference administrator (not just Zoom's analytics) what else you're doing on your computer? Apparently it's in the T&Cs or something (which nobody ever reads). Worth bearing in mind...
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Has anyone mentioned that Zoom tells the conference administrator (not just Zoom's analytics) what else you're doing on your computer? Apparently it's in the T&Cs or something (which nobody ever reads). Worth bearing in mind...
Run the damn thing in a VM !
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What about Jitsi? It is free, open source, cross platform etc. https://jitsi.org/
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Cisco Webex - Windows 7 and above
webex sucks
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Mostly used Zoom recently, daily meeting with 20 users (I've been working remotely for literally years)
In the past I've had good experiences with Google Hangouts: in the sense that it was easier to setup and use than Zoom and worked fine for up to 10 users
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What about Jitsi? It is free, open source, cross platform etc. https://jitsi.org/
I'm very impressed with Jitsi. Nothing to install, just send a link to people and off they go. We've been using it in preference to slack, skype, skype for business (just don't) and a few other things.
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Don't forget to shout, "Alexa, play heavy metal!" just as the meeting starts.
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There's talk of using Teams at my work :-\
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We started on Webex, started to move to Skype but now Teams is starting to rear its head. So now we're using a mix of all three. Zoom and Slack are something I've only heard of here in the last couple of weeks.
Of course, once the umbilical cord to Mother Redacted has been cut I expect we'll be back on tin cans and string.
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Teams seems to crap out the audio on me, far more than Webex. No idea why, you'd think if the broadband can handle 4k streaming it would handle a bit of audio without stuttering into periodical incomprehensibility. Walking upstairs and sitting next to the router doesn't make any difference.
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Teams works pretty well for us. As a video conference or teleconference application, it's fine. As a chat application, it's massively worse than Skype (you can't delete or export a chat). As a file sharing/collaboration application, it sucks ass.
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Teams seems to crap out the audio on me, far more than Webex. No idea why, you'd think if the broadband can handle 4k streaming it would handle a bit of audio without stuttering into periodical incomprehensibility. Walking upstairs and sitting next to the router doesn't make any difference.
4K streaming, well streaming of any kind is buffered that's the difference. Real time audio is almost completely unbuffered, if the packets don't get there 150 milliseconds after you speak you might as well not have sent them. Jitter of more than 30 milliseconds will also screw it up.
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Fair enough, but Webex audio was fine and Facetime is fine, but Teams isn't. I could ask our IT team...
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Teams will be pushing all the video and voice streams through a "conference bridge" server that's probably sitting in one of your own data centres somewhere. Webex is usually using one off Cisco own servers as the bridge (they usually sell it as a service rather than you owning your own back end kit). Same for Facetime. Also when only two people are involved eg Facetime between two people or Skype or usually any VoIP or Video between two people the voice and video goes direct between them rather than through a bridge as with conferencing to more than two people.