We’re loving using meet.coop at Animorph, thanks to everyone for the continued work, we’re very happy to be on the journey with you!
Want to report two (non-persisting) errors today, not asking for anything, but for the record:
Restored tabs (Firefox) after restarting machine (MacOS), meet.coop among the tabs, when joining a room from the restored tab I got this error each time I tried:
An unhandled lowlevel error occurred. The application logs may have details.
Refreshed that tab, then got into the room, but got this error each time I gave the browser permission to access audio:
There was an issue with your media devices
Did you give permission for access to your microphone? Note that a dialog should appear when you try to join audio, asking for your media device permissions, please accept that in order to join the audio conference. If that is not the case, try changing your microphone permissions in your browser’s settings.
As a result of this major upgrade on August 27 we switched to using a new TURN server that should have resolved most of our Safari webcam problems, on desktop and mobile. This has been confirmed by Collocall testing. (For those interested in learning about what a TURN server is, I recommend this recent article.)
I am documenting my own test results here. I am using a particularly old Safari Version 11.1 (13605.1.33.1.4), where it’s possible that I have the H.264 but not the VP8 codec. On both the ca.meet.coop instance (after upgrade), and Hypha’s bbb.hypha.coop, I get the same error when I try to enable webcam:
Since H.264 should be widely supported, this seems to suggest BBB is using VP8 and will not work for old versions of Safari. I am not sure if this is configurable nor the pros and cons of doing so.
Note that VP8 support is added to later versions of Safari, and I expect everything to work were I not stuck in a 2017 release of Safari. I am not suggesting any change to our current BBB server configurations, but documenting this in case others run into error 2203 on Safari. The solution is update your browser.
Digital Life Collective ran our AGM on ca.meet.coop yesterday. Or to be more accurate we tried to. Our main speaker for the event could not get a clear enough audio input, such that others in the call were able to hear what they were saying. This has been an issue for some time now with this person on meet.coop calls. They tried different browsers and even a different machine at their end but couldn’t get a result. We had no option but to switch the call to Zoom which worked fine. No audio issues.
The person concerned uses Zoom and Teams daily for meetings with no issues, suggesting that the problem is with us.
I still find the meet.coop system to be very fussy with respect to audio, and That I often have to resort to using a headset to avoid echo/feedback that others can hear. Again this isn’t my experience with other services.
I have to say that it is disappointing given that so much work has gone in so far, to see that fundamentals such as audio quality are still an issue. I don’t know the cause of the problem but I do believe that it should be prioritised.
Especially if only a subset of the people in the meeting have problems it’s very helpful if we have more information about these users, e.g. location, type of internet connection/bandwidth, OS/Type of device, browser, headset etc.
From what you wrote it sounds like this person was not using a headset which caused echoes? Zoom seems to have a more sophisticated canceling of echoes, BBB apparently not. Is that what happened @Graham ?
What other people on the call experienced was described as ‘choppy’ audio. As if the signal was being broken every few seconds. I’ve had a similar audio experience on a poor mobile connection, or where there is a bad electrical connection on a wired microphone - sound cutting in and out very briefly every few seconds. I’ll get in touch with the person concerned to ask for more details of their set-up and will post back here.
Hi again @hng. Here’s the detail provided by my colleague:
Location: London.
Connectivity: Via Windscribe VPN with UK endpoint. Min 34 Mbps Plusnet broadband.
Latest Mac OS on a Macbook.
Latest Firefox, but also tried the latest Safari with no improvement in audio.
The mic is integral to the Logitech Brio webcam.
Consistent audio problems with meet.coop. Three out of three times now. Nothing vaguely similar with Zoom, Teams, Facetime, or Skype
Can this person do a ping to ca.meet.coop and report the results? We had one speaker at Our Networks experiencing this. He was having ISP problems on that specific day, where his pings would vary from low to 350 ms range. It has nothing to do with bandwidth (34 Mbps) but with latency.
In this particular case at Our Networks, I was able to spend an hour debugging with the speaker. He had perfect audio and video just 2 hours ago, and then this happened. Then if he uses another BBB server he was fine. So it was particularly informative. We found that his route to the working BBB server had ~200 ms latency, but his route to ca.meet.coop had ~350 ms, and the audio went from perfect to completely broken in that range. Once we determined the problem, he called the ISP to reboot something in his region and it was resolved, it was an ISP partial “outage”.
@Graham I’d be really curious to see what your colleague’s ping is when he’s experiencing this, and how we can improve the networking in our org. I think it’s not the app, it’s the networking, and it is partly on the client side and partly on our Meet.coop side.
As a datapoint, me pinging from Canada:
❯❯❯ ping ca.meet.coop ⏎
PING ca.meet.coop (199.58.82.68): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=0 ttl=55 time=12.124 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=10.357 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=12.725 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=13.527 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=4 ttl=55 time=10.752 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=5 ttl=55 time=12.495 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=6 ttl=55 time=10.567 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=7 ttl=55 time=10.740 ms
64 bytes from 199.58.82.68: icmp_seq=8 ttl=55 time=11.548 ms
As you can see, once we have a local server, things will drastically improve. My ping is 10 ms, not in the 100s. We are hoping to spin up a EU server as soon as we have the money.
Thanks for reporting this and your help in debugging this.
Just to add, the last two times I’ve used my ca.meet.coop account it’s been really disappointing too
The first time I had a terrible echo - I could hear everything I was saying echoed back. There were only 2 people (including me) on the call. The other person wasn’t even using video. Quite frustrating.
The second time (which included @Graham and one other person), the sound kept cutting out and/ or the video freezing. Closing all my tabs seemed to help (and before that, stopping an update that hard started running in the background).
It almost seems like it’s working worse than my own self-hosted Nextcloud Talk
FYI, I’ve no idea what ping time I was getting at the time of those calls, but right now my ping to ca.meet.coop is about 95-100 ms (and 35-40 ms to my Nextcloud).
Just to report, I had a one to one video chat with someone last Friday.
After having a complete nightmare of a time getting it to connect to my mic and headphones (this normally isn’t an issue, but I tried a new set-up and it just couldn’t detect it, and then I couldn’t switch back. After a reboot it was all fine again though (just restarting the browser didn’t seem to help) it mostly went OK. I wish there were setting to change mic/ speaker within BBB like there is in Zoom and in the latest Nextcloud Talk (so I read).
Both participants had ping times of around 100ms to ca.meet.coop and both wore headphones. I still experienced the odd echo though.
It seems to me that BBB just hasn’t had the investment in audio processing development that the likes of Zoom etc have which are great a filtering out echoes etc.
If you click on „No“ in the echo test you can select your audio input and output devices and restart the echo test. The echo test can be manually started by deactivating and activating audio (blue button on the bottom).
The same thing happened today, with no audio output being shown, and echo test not working:
In the end I joined anyway and it actually worked (i.e. they could hear me, I could hear them). But last time it happened it didn’t work.
Although, that aside, I actually came here to report that today I used ca.meet.coop twice, once in a meeting with 5 other people (so 6 total) and once just me and my Mum …
And I’m pleased to report that today (apart from the echo test malarkey) everything went very smoothly in terms of audio and video. In the 6 person meeting only 2 of us were wearing headphones, but no one reported any issues.
Ah, actually there was one issue in that my mic level seemed to maxed out and even if I turned it down locally that didn’t seem to help (but than on the next call with failing echo test with just my Mum at first she couldn’t hear me beacuse I’d turned my mic levels down so much trying to stop it being so loud in the 6 person meeting). I guess the mic thing could’ve just been a local issue with my Ubuntu 20.04 on my old Lenovo T510 laptop
Oh, and at one point my Mum said my video had gone all pixelated when moving, but turning my video off and back on again and choosing high definition instead of medium seemed to resolve that.
Had a really bad experience with a one to one video call with my Mum again today (around 14:45 UK time)
I could see and hear her fine, but my audio kept cracking up. And the she stared hearing echoes of herself all the time too.
I checked my ping times and they were worse than normal. I normally get about 100 whereas this time they were consistently higher, sometimes even going over 1000:
I’m not sure why though, because I did a speed check on https://speedof.me/ at the same time and it seems our speeds were good. I forgot to save them but I was about 25mb down and 8mb up, although I think ping latency was about 70.
We had bad weather so perhaps that was effecting it somehow?
Or maybe others were having meetings at the same time and that impacted it somehow?
/me shrugs.
I’m really looking forward to it “just working” at some point in the (hopefully near) future.
Hi all! Nick M from Resonate here: We’re experiencing a few problems with audio clipping. Folks are using a variety of browsers, mostly chrome, firefox and occasionally brave. Those in the US and Belgium seem to experience the clipping more than I do locally, but perhaps they hear me clipped also. The audio quality starts OK but then seems to deteriorate through the call. We have 5, or maybe six people on the call, turning video off seems to help a little. We do not seem to get similar problems, over the same network / devices with meet.jit.si which seems to degrade more ‘gracefully’ when users are added beyond about 5 or 6 people. Zoom quality is good, but we don’t like using that Suggestions / thoughts welcome!
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