Freely available Jami video-conference channel for those interested

[Maxim Cournoyer]

Hello Guix,

Disclaimer: my employer is Savoir-faire Linux, which oversees the
development of Jami.

For a while, I've toyed with the idea that we could leverage Jami for
our video-conference needs, and contributed a jami-service-type a few
months ago to ease doing so [0].

A service is not strictly needed to setup a video-conferencing server
(later referred as a "rendezvous point") with Jami [1], it increases
availability and can be used without a normal user session.  It also
provides some isolation from the main system since it runs in a separate
namespace (container), at least on Guix System.

The main challenges for a decent experience with the Jami rendezvous
point feature is its resource requirements; as the number of
participants grow, so does the required amount of network bandwidth and
CPU power.

As some kind of technology preview, I'd like to offer a freely available
Jami rendezvous point.  Using either the jami-gnome or jami-qt client
available in Guix, you can connect to it by searching for the
'rdv-jami-guix' contact and initiating a call.  Participants' audio and
video streams will automatically be mixed and streamed by the server.

On a Guix System, installing it to your user profile should suffice.  On
a foreign distribution, you'll have to resort to a more complicated
launch procedure, thanks to D-Bus configuration [2].  Something like this
should work:

$ guix shell jami-gnome dbus glib gtk+ openssl nss-certs \
    -- dbus-run-session jami-gnome

I hope it proves useful in fostering more live collaboration in the
community!  Extra rendezvous points could also be deployed if needed.
If the experience is successful we could seek a better place to host
such service for the community (where it could be managed by the
collective of Guix sysadmins rather than myself for example).

Happy hacking,

Maxim

[0]  
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/commit/?id=69dcc24c9f0cdfea674eb690e7755d26a25ced2b
[1]  https://jami.net/help/#answer14
[2]  https://issues.guix.gnu.org/48538