[Galene] Re: Galène for bigger meeting (10-15 people) - problems and UX questions

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

Hi Valent,

> I am testing Galène on my own server with the Docker image. The install works
> fine, technically Galène works without problem.

Are you running Galene on bare hardware, or inside a Docker container?
Since you still haven't described how you worked around the limitations of
Docker's networking setup, there's not much we can help with if it's the
latter.

> But still many of them had technical problems - for some the audio did not
> work, some had glitches.

Did you have enough throughput on the server to handle all of the traffic?
Since Galene was optimised for lectures with many students, Galene is pretty
good at dealing with congestion in the server->client direction, but deals
poorly with congestion in the client->server direction: we expect the
lecturer to have a good connection, or, if they do not, to limit
throughput using the « Send » side menu.

> - Mirek: "We needed a 'raise hand' button and didn't find one, otherwise
> everything worked afaik"

Yep, the Raise Hand button is hidden in the menu.  I remember that you
volunteered to fix that.

> - DJ Stern: "I didn't hear or see anyone"

That looks like Firefox bug 2033783:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2033783.  Please ask them to
upgrade their browser.

(I'm starting to be seriously p*ssed off with the bugs in Firefox's
implementation of WebRTC, I'm really tempted to add a warning that Firefox
is not supported.)

> "it was visually glitching out between the text chat and attendees view"

> My feeling is there is quite a lot of UI/UX problems here. For example, by
> default it asks "what you want - microphone, or microphone + camera". My guess
> is that many people who had problems did not understand what this means, and
> they left it on default "none", and that is why their audio did not work.

That's a deliberate design choice.  It is my opinion that a normal human
being do not want to walk into a meeting with their camera switched on:
they want to lurk for a while before they switch their camera on.  At
least, that's my experience with students.

After a lot of discussions, I have agreed to add the login menu for those
people who really want to show their face straight away, but the expected
UX is that you come in, lurk for a while, then hit « Present ».

> I don't really understand why someone would log in to a room as chat only.

Because you want to listen to the discussion for a while before you
participate?  Or perhaps because it's a lecture and you're a student who
will only turn on their camera when they have a question to ask?

> Let the camera and microphone be off by default, but the browser must
> have the permissions, because otherwise for a big number of people
> Galène is useless - it will make problems and they simply will not use it.

I'm not sure.  Should we be asking for permissions even for those users
who only intend to listen to the lecture?

> So my question: who used Galène in such situation, with 10-15 people, and what
> problems did you have?

For 10 people, the server is receiving 10 flows, and sending 90 flows (9
flows to 10 people).  At 700kbit/s for each flow, that's over 7Mbit/s down
and 60Mbit/s up from the point of view of the server.  Is your
connectivity in that ballpark?

-- Juliusz