Dino 0.3: Video calls and conferences – encrypted and peer-to-peer

I run a group chat for my family. I recently switched my server from running plain Prosody to Snikket. People with phones use the Snikket android app, but my kids that are too young for phones join in with Dino. Dino is a really nice client. Snikket is pretty good as a phone client... I think maybe there is a way to get push notifications working through the standard Android infrastructure which would be an improvement, but I haven&#x27;t done that yet.<p>I guess the functionality isn&#x27;t better (let&#x27;s be honest, it&#x27;s probably worse) than the proprietary alternatives, but for now the family is happy with it and I feel good about the extra privacy &#x2F; lack of advertising &#x2F; etc.<p>Really appreciate all the people that put in the work to make this possible. Great work Dino team.

Great! Dino is my XMPP client of choice, it&#x27;s good to see a new release.<p>My partner and family use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quicksy.im&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quicksy.im&#x2F;</a> which is an XMPP client that uses their phone number as username, to give it a &quot;convenient as WhatsApp&#x2F;Signal&quot; feel.<p>I run the mobile UI branch <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dino&#x2F;dino&#x2F;tree&#x2F;feature&#x2F;handy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dino&#x2F;dino&#x2F;tree&#x2F;feature&#x2F;handy</a> on my Pinephone.

For a second I thought I read &quot;Deno&quot; instead of &quot;Dino&quot; and got extremely confused at why Deno was going into the video chat space.<p>Anyways, nice milestone for Dino! I still gotta try out the solution one day.

I love Dino! I want to tell all my friends to install it on their ... oh. Oh no. They use macOS and Windows.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to be a downer, but if you want to reach a lot of people with your amazing software (not saying that you have to, but it seems like one of the intentions of the project), it&#x27;s a good idea to get them where they already are.<p>Side note 1: Vala&#x2F;GTK could be an amazing app development platform if the cross-OS story was clearly (it can absolutely cover desktop OSes and I think even phones, but how to do it isn&#x27;t very clear and most GTK apps don&#x27;t).<p>Side note 2: Dino seems to be co-developed by the guy who makes microG, another great piece of software (replaces Google services on Android).<p>Side note 3: It would be great to see an XMPP revival. Quality clients like Dino are a key part to this. An important part for <i>that</i> may be another standardization effort with a low number of groups of clearly defined XEPs to support some functionality (a huge problem appears to be the sheer number and fragmentation of XEPs).

Ever since Google Talk stopped supporting Jabber, I quickly ran out of anyone to talk with. I talk with friends on Signal, I talk with FOSS projects on IRC or Matrix, and I occasionally set up ad-hoc video conferences using Jitsi Meet, but I have zero Jabber contacts left.<p>If you use Jabber today, who are you talking to and on what server(s)?

It looks like Dino is built on top of XMPP. How can you be both XMPP and peer to peer? Doesn&#x27;t XMPP mean there is a server in the middle (even if its not centralized)?

This is great, I knew this was in development for a while, but I did not expect it to land this early. 1 to 1 audio&#x2F;video calls using Conversations and other apps work already perfectly, but group video chat using standardized technology was really missing from the ecosystem, I am glad that this is now done.

For those who want to try Dino here is (text?) chat:<p>&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chat@dino.im?join" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chat@dino.im?join</a><p>In <i>Dino</i> (Desktop) window click on [+] in left-top corner on app title bar, and then input channel to join as next:<p><pre><code> chat@dino.im </code></pre> Then click <i>&quot;Next&quot;</i> button.<p>N.B. Here is offical announcment of Dino 0.3 release thread on Mastodon.[0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fosstodon.org&#x2F;@dino&#x2F;107787204408646020" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fosstodon.org&#x2F;@dino&#x2F;107787204408646020</a>

The thing about video call apps is - seemingly, no matter how great the internet is on both ends, the video quality is still laggy and blocky. We have 30 Mbps on both ends. That&#x27;s supposed to be near bluray quality. But that&#x27;s not what we get. Even when I use the crappy 720p camera, what I get over the internet is much worse.<p>From our testing, Whatsapp is one of the worst. Zoom is in between. Hangouts is usually decent. But again, nowhere near bluray quality.

What is the latency on this? Still looking for a call solution that makes you feel like you‘re in the same room…

Is there a way to run this on macOS?

is setting up and maintaining an xmpp &#x2F;jabber server and clients easier&#x2F;difficult than matrix?<p>i have been mulling the switch to a selfhosted thing for some time now but i need something that can run on low resources but isnt overly complicated

It&#x27;s written in Vala [1]. I had never heard of it before.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vala_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vala_(programming_language)</a>

P2P group video calls don’t work well unfortunately. Most people barely have enough upload bandwidth to upload one video stream. Needing to upload a stream per peer is a nonstarter for most people.

What happened with tox.im , are the two products competitors?

Aren&#x27;t p2p apps expose IPs of peers?