Jitsi Meet

What you get from this

Jitsi Meet is video meetings in the browser. Anyone taking part clicks a link and is in. No app to install, no account to create, no time limit that cuts the meeting off after forty minutes.

For a company, that means two concrete things. You can hold the weekly meeting from home without anyone having to ask for an account. And you can send a meeting link to a customer, a partner or a supplier without forcing a program on them that their employer may have blocked.

The program is also open source, and the entire server side can be run yourself. The last part of the guide covers that route, but do not start there.

What you need

• A reasonably new browser. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari work. Chrome and Edge are the most stable for screen sharing.
• A camera and microphone. The built-in one in the laptop is good enough. A pair of headphones with a microphone makes a bigger difference to sound quality than any setting in the program.
• An account with Google, Facebook or GitHub, but only for the person starting the meeting. More on that in a moment.

Start a meeting on meet.jit.si

The public service is run by Jitsi itself and is at meet.jit.si.

1. Open the page. In the box, enter a name for the meeting, for example foretagsmote-tisdag.
2. Click the button to start.
3. The browser asks if it may use your camera and microphone. Answer yes, otherwise you will not be seen or heard. If you blocked it by mistake: click the padlock or camera icon in the address bar and allow the permission there.
4. Enter your name in the box and join the meeting.
5. If you are first in, Jitsi asks you to either log in or wait for a moderator. Log in with Google, Facebook or GitHub. This is a requirement Jitsi introduced to stop abuse of the open service, and it only applies to the person who creates the room.
6. Copy the link at the top and send it to the others. They do not need to log in to anything.

The room only exists as long as someone is in it. When the last person leaves, it disappears. If you enter the same name again next week, you get a new, empty room.

The room name matters more than it sounds

Use no spaces, no special characters and no åäö in the meeting name. Jitsi itself tells you this, and the reason is that the name becomes part of the web address. A room called Planeringsmöte gives a link that different programs cut off at different points, and then half the company ends up in the wrong room.

There is one more thing, and it is security related: anyone who guesses the name gets in. A room called mote or test is easy to guess. Let Jitsi suggest a name, or make up something nobody would guess, for example gronsaksgrill-2026-tisdag.

If you are going to talk about something you do not want a stranger to hear: click the padlock in the meeting and set a password. You can also turn on Lobby, which means you have to approve every person who knocks. That is the better setting for a meeting with a client.

What you need to find in the meeting

The buttons are along the bottom edge.

• Microphone and camera are turned off and on at the far left. The spacebar keeps the microphone open for as long as you hold it down, which is handy when you only have one thing to say.
• Share screen is the button with a square and an arrow. You choose between the entire screen, a single window or a tab in the browser. Choose a tab when you are showing a web page, so you avoid showing your notifications. Check the box for sound if you are showing a film.
• Chat for links during the meeting. The content disappears when the meeting ends, so anything you want to keep must be sent somewhere else.
• Raise hand is unexpectedly useful when there are more than four of you. Otherwise everyone talks over each other.
• Settings under the three dots. That is where you set the quality. If the picture is choppy, drop to low resolution; the sound gets better almost immediately.

The person who created the room is the moderator and can mute other people's microphones and remove participants. If that person leaves the meeting, the role passes to someone else.

The app on your computer and phone

The browser is enough. But screen sharing is more stable in the desktop app, and it is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

For Windows, download the installation file from jitsi.org/downloads and run it like any other program.

On Linux Mint, use Flatpak:

flatpak install flathub org.jitsi.jitsi-meet

For your phone, there are apps in the App Store and Google Play. They are good to have if you will join a meeting on the bus, but screen sharing from a phone is rarely worth the trouble.

If something goes wrong

Nobody can hear you. First check that the microphone is not muted in Jitsi, then that the right microphone is selected in the settings. If you have wired headphones plugged in, the computer sometimes picks the built-in microphone anyway.

Echo. Two people are sitting in the same room with their own computer and their own speakers. The solution is headphones, not settings.

The video stutters and the sound comes in chunks. Turn off your own video. That helps more than anything else on a weak connection. Everyone in the company does not need to be visible all the time.

The camera permission cannot be restored. Click the icon to the left in the address bar, remove the block and reload the page.

Someone cannot get in. Nine times out of ten the link is cut off in the chat where you sent it. Send it as plain text, not embedded in a sentence.

Running Jitsi on your own server

This section is for those who have already gone through the guide Install Docker and want to own the whole chain. Skip it otherwise. There is no reason to run your own video server just to have a weekly meeting on Tuesdays.

Jitsi publishes ready-made containers and the instructions below follow the project's own documentation. You download the latest release as a zip file, not via git, because the code in git is built for test versions of the containers:

wget $(wget -q -O - https://api.github.com/repos/jitsi/docker-jitsi-meet/releases/latest | grep zip | cut -d '"' -f4)

Unpack, go into the folder and create the settings file from the example:

cp env.example .env
./gen-passwords.sh

The script fills in strong passwords in the places in .env that need them. Then you create the folders that the containers write to. They run as a regular user without extra permissions, so the folders must exist and be writable before the first start. If they are missing, the containers refuse to start, with an error message that says which folder it concerns:

mkdir -p ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/{web,prosody/config,prosody/prosody-plugins-custom,jicofo,jvb,jigasi,jibri,transcriber}
mkdir -p ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/storage/{jibri,prosody,transcripts,web}
mkdir -p ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/tmp/{web-crontabs,web-load-test}
chmod 777 ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/storage/{jibri,prosody,transcripts,web}
chmod 777 ~/.jitsi-meet-cfg/tmp/{web-crontabs,web-load-test}

Then start:

docker compose up -d

The web interface is at https://localhost:8443. There is also an HTTP port, 8000, but do not go that way: browsers only allow camera and microphone over HTTPS, and you get an error message that the microphone cannot be used.

Two things should be said straight out before you spend an evening on this. It works for testing on your own computer, not for real meetings with outsiders. A video server needs a public address that others can reach, a domain name and a certificate, and it needs to let traffic through directly from each participant. Behind a regular home router, no one can reach in from outside. If it is to be used for real, you need a server at a hosting company, and then the variable PUBLIC_URL in .env should point to the real address. Do not forget the video bridge: JVB_ADVERTISE_IPS should point to the server's real public address, and the firewall must let through UDP on port 10000, otherwise it works with two participants but not with three or more.

And: video meetings cost bandwidth and processing power. Four people is fine. Twenty people on a small cloud server is not.

The license

Jitsi Meet is under Apache-2.0. You may use the service, run your own server, modify the code and use all of it in your company. The public service meet.jit.si is run by 8x8 and has its own terms of use that you accept when you log in; they apply to the service, not the software.

Are you wondering whether you need your own server or whether the public one is enough? Call us and we will sort it out.