What’s that? How does it work?

What is Jitsi Meet?

Jitsi Meet is a video conferencing software, something similar to Skype, Zoom and co, only on self-hosted servers, open source and encrypted. It can be used via mobile app or web browser. The Fachschaft Physik hosts this service on a server of the faculty to provide a secure communication possibility. The great thing about Jitsi is that you don’t need an account to join the conversation, so no unnecessary data is collected here and you can add friends to conversations that are not logged in on this platform. However, this also means that publishing the links on your blog, for example, can lead to unlimited entries. If links are made public, this can overload the server and lead to a worse transmission quality for all your fellow students.

How does Jitsi Meet work?

  • Example case 1: you get a link to join the meeting
    Just click on it and you are in the conference. Either open it directly in your browser or (if you use it often, it’s nice to manage) in the Jitsi App. If you want you can give yourself a name in the chat (indicated by the small bubble symbol). If you have the app, this name will remain in your next calls. If the room you are invited to has a password, you have to get this as well.

  • Example case 2: You want to invite others
    Click on the Jitsi link on the platform. This will redirect you to meet.physik.kit.edu, the URL where the Jitsi server of the Fachschaft Physik can be found. Either you are satisfied with the (maybe a bit confusing) name, or you just type in another name and click on the Go button. If you now want to invite others to join you, a field should open automatically which allows you to send the invitation link and to set a password (more on this below). If this window doesn’t open, or closes again while you were distracted, don’t worry, just click on the small exclamation mark in the bottom right corner and it will open again. Once you have sent the link, you are ready to go.

  • Permanently open rooms and the thing with the password
    If you start a new meeting with a new name, you create a so-called room. Suppose you send an invitation to your friend into this room, but then hang up because your friend does not appear. 5 minutes later, however, he clicks on the link and appears in the room you have opened, alone now of course, but you can join him again. This raises the question: Was the room open the whole time? No. It was not. As soon as everyone has left the meeting, the room will be destroyed and with it the generated password. But it can be created again either by starting a new meeting with the same name or by clicking on the join link. If you all have the link to a room, you can use it over and over again. So ‘After Hours Beer with Friends’ can be clicked every night and you will end up together. What does this mean for you?

    1. you can always meet your friends in the same named room by clicking on the same link over and over again
    2. passwords are deleted as soon as nobody is in the room anymore.

  • Jitsi’s dislike of Firefox
    Sometimes Jitsi unfortunately does not work under the Firefox browser. Possible solutions are to open Jitsi with Chrome or install the Desktop-App.