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!
Yeah, those are all fair points. We’ve been using Jitsi for work with pretty much no problems, albeit in group calls where video and audio quality don’t matter too much. Someone below gave some good recommendations for hardware as well.
The helpdesk issue… IDK. If Jitsi works, it is incredibly easy to use, right? Basically just, click this link and you’re in. (If does some heavy lifting there, I know :D)
In theory you just send a link to click and that’s it. But, as there always is a but, your jitsi setup most likely don’t have massive load balancing, dozens of locations for servers and all the jazz which goes around random network issues and everything else which keeps the internet running.
There’s a ton of things well outside your control and they may or may not bite you in the process. Big players have tons of workforce and money to make sure that kind of things don’t happen and they still do now and then. Personally, for a single use scenario like yours, I wouldn’t bother, but I’m not stopping you either, it’s a pretty neat thing to do. My (now dead) jitsi instance once saved a city council meeting when teams had issues and that got me a pretty good bragging rights, so it can be pretty rewarding too.