Basically, the title. After years of inactivty, I’ll be taking music (cello) lessons again, with my teacher of yesteryear, from whom I’ve moved half a country away.

She has suggested Zoom but is open to alternatives. I don’t particularly like Zoom, plus I have a feeling better quality can be had through a custom solution - but I’m at a bit of a loss as to what exactly would be a good fit for this project.

Maybe Jitsi? Does someone here have experience with it and could tell me if it’s possible to set something like a “target” audio quality?

For hardware, I basically have two options. Both are already in use, for different things, and have sufficient processing capabilities - albeit no GPU:

  • host everything at home. Plus: lowest possible latency from me to the server. Not sure how much that is worth though.
  • root server in the Hetzner cloud: much faster network speed. Again though, not sure how beneficial that is, the ultimate bottleneck will always be my upload speed (40Mbit)

OK, I realize that this post is a but of a random assortment of thoughts. I’d be really happy about suggestions and / or hearing about other’s experiences with similar use-cases!

  • parisEnglish
    6·
    4 months ago

    Consider giving MiroTalk a try. It has several versions but the P2P version would probably be perfect for your scenario. It’s free, runs in your browser, doesn’t need an account, and doesn’t have time limit shenanigans. I’ve used it in lieu of Discord calls before and don’t have any complaints.

    GitHub

    Public instance

    • akwd169@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      Fascinating, thanks for sharing. I see it says peer to peer vid chat and works in the browser but I’m wondering if it requires setting up a server or using a public instance, something like that?

      Or is it possible for two people to go to the web page and start a vid chat with zero installation or any other preamble?

      Sorry I’m away from home so I can’t look into the GitHub page deeply enough to answer my own questions

      • parisEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        If you use the public instance you don’t need to set up or host or install anything. You can selfhost it if you want, but the public instance works just fine.

        One person goes to the web page and starts a room. The other can join the same room by knowing the name of the room. (It will generate a link when you create a room to make it easy to send to someone so they can join by just clicking the link.)

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Thanks for the recommendation! Looks like a great option. Actually, the p2p aspect prompted me to have another look at the Jitsi docs, and lo and behold, there’s an option for that, as long as no more than 2 people participate in a chat… (The reason I’d prefer Jitsi is actually just that NixOS comes with options for jitsi out of the box, for Miro I would have to introduce containers into my setup :D)