With the current movement from an offline to a digital ecosystem, Zoom, MS Teams and Skype have filled the void of video communication especially for enterprise collaboration. However, the open source general purpose video conferencing market is yet to catch up. The existing solutions either have propreitary backend or are too complicated to make contributions to. This means that if I had a feature proposal or software patch, I will have to go through a lot of trouble and delay to get it merged to production.
ZiMS-GP
This is where ZiMS-GP comes in. ZiMS-GP is a proposed community maintained project that uses browser based WebRTC in a mesh topology with Firebase Cloud Firestore for signalling and Firebase Hosting for cost-effective deployment. It optimizes on cost and quality for ~5 person party calls.
Features
ZiMS-GP currently supports the following video conferencing features:
- Video room - Create multi-party video chat rooms
- Audio and video mute
- Grid layout
- Screen sharing with screen sharing layout
- Link invites
- Browser Interop for iOS Safari and most WebRTC compatible browsers for Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux. It is also actively looking for maintainers to implement features like Text Chat, Push Notifications amongst others.
Community
ZiMS-GP welcomes all sorts of forks, PRs and feature requests. The vision behind the project is that if developers want a feature to be implemented in ZiMS they will get full community support and zero delay in getting it implemented. Its a project of the community, by the community and for the community.