Features

Support for Mobile Devices Android

Done. Gromiles Talk runs within the Chrome browser (no app to install) on Android 6.0+. You can test this at “URL To be mentioned here for demo”
iOS
Done. Gromiles Talk runs within the Safari browser (no app to install) on iOS 12.2+. You can test this at “URL To be mentioned here for demo”.

Bandwidth Requirements

What are the bandwidth requirements for running a Gromiles Talk server ?
You’ll need good upstream and downstream bandwidth from the server. We recommend (at least) 100 MBits/second bandwidth in both directions.
When sharing a webcam as a moderator, Gromiles Talk lets you select 320x240, 640x480, or 1280x720. For bandwidth calculations, each
resolution corresponds (roughly) to a .25 Mbits/sec, 0.40 Mbits/sec, and 0.60 Mbits/sec video stream respectively.
For example, if you have a room with 5 users, each sharing their webcam at 320x240, then you can calculate the bandwidth usage as follows:
• Y = .25 Mbits/sec
• W = amount of webcams that are streaming
• U = amount of users that are watching For calculations:
• server incoming bandwidth: W*Y
• server outgoing bandwidth: W*(U-1)*Y (minus one since a broadcaster does not have to subscribe to his own stream)
For example, with 5 users in a room with 5 webcams streaming, the bandwidth calculation is as follows:
• in: 5*.25 = 1.25 Mbits/sec incoming bandwidth needed to the server, or 3600*1.25 = 4.5 GBits/hr
• out: 5*(5-1)*.25 = 5 Mbits/sec outgoing bandwidth needed from the server, or 3600*5 = 18 Gbits/hr
If you’d have a typical classroom situation one presenter broadcasting their webcam to 30 remote students, the calculation is as follows:
• in: 1*.25 = .25 Mbits/sec incoming, or 3600*.25 = 0.9 GBits/hr
• out: 1*(30-1)*.25 = 7.25 Mbits/sec outgoing, or 3600*7.25 = 26.1 GBits/hr Large “cafe-style chatroom”: 20 viewers, 8 people
broadcasting with a webcam:
• in: 8*.25 = 2 Mbits/sec incoming, or 3600*2 = 7.2 GBits/hr
• out: 8*(20-1)*.25 = 38 Mbits/sec outgoing, or 3600* = 136.8 Gbits/hr
Sharing slides takes almost no bandwidth beyond the initial uploading/downloading of slides. When the presenter clicks to show the next
slide, the viewers receive a “move next slide” command in their Gromiles Talk client, and they load the next slide from the local
cache. Chat also takes almost no bandwidth.
Screen sharing sharing takes the most bandwidth. The actual bandwidth for desktop sharing depends on the size of the area chosen by the
presenter (full screen and region) and how often their screen updates. At the low end, if the presenter’s screen is largely idle, the
screen sharing application will transmit about
0.2 Mbits/sec; at the high end, if the presenter’s screen is updating frequently, the Gromiles Talk server could transmit 1.0 Mbits/
sec. For a session with N users, Gromiles Talk server would also transmit N desktop sharing streams (the presenter gets a stream as
well for their Screen Sharing Preview window).
A VoIP connection to the Gromiles Talk server takes roughly 0.04 Mbits/sec receiving and 0.04 Mbits/sec transmitting for each user. The
bandwidth for VoIP grows linearly with number of users. For example, if there are 20 students in a classroom, then the bandwidth
requirements for the server to support VoIP is 20 * 0.04 Mbits/sec = 0.8 Mbits/sec. If the user joins as Listen Only, they only receive
audio (not transmit it).
From the perspective of the user’s bandwidth needs, if a student is broadcasting their webcam and microphone they require a minimum (
roughly) 0.3 Mbits/sec (.25 + .04) upstream bandwidth. If the student is in a session with four other people that are all broadcasting
their webcams as well, the student will require the roughly 1 Mbits/sec incoming bandwidth for the 4 *0.25 = 1 Mbits/sec incoming webcams
and 0.04 Mbits/sec for the incoming audio.
The Gromiles Talk server will lower the bandwidth to a user if their bandwidth is insufficient to receive all stream. For example, in
the scenario above where there are 5 students in a session, each
sharing a webcam, if 4 students have sufficient bandwidth to receive all incoming webcam streams, their clients will show roughly the same
quality of video. If one of the students is on a lower bandwidth, then they will get less frequent updates on the video streams and may get
lower quality of audio. The user who is on lower bandwidth does not affect the streaming to other users.
What are the minimum bandwidth requirements for a user?
For viewers (students), we recommend users have (at least) 0.5 Mbits/sec – which is 500 Kbits/sec – upstream bandwidth, and (at least) 1
Mbits/sec download bandwidth. The upstream bandwidth is the amount of bandwidth their computer has available to transmit data to the
Gromiles Talk server.
These are not hard and fast numbers, as it depends on the activity of the viewer. If the viewer is not broadcasting any webcam, the amount
of upstream bandwidth used would be less than 0.5 Mbits/sec.
A good way for users to check their bandwidth is to visit speedtest.net. The results from speedtest.net give the user’s actual bandwidth.
This actual number is important because a user may report that their ISP provides them 0.5 Mbits/sec upstream bandwidth; however,
may report an actual
number that is much lower. The difference may be throttling by the ISP and background activity on their computer (such as background
downloads, file sharing clients, etc).
For presenters, we recommend as much upstream bandwidth as possible. For example, if the presenter shares their desktop, then Gromiles Talk
Software’s desktop sharing will attempt to publish their desktop updates as quickly as possible to the server.
Is wired connection better than wireless
Yes. A user may have very good experience with wireless internet, but if others hear their audio as broken or choppy, that user can either
move closer to the wireless base station, try a different wireless network, or (best) connect directly to a wired connection.
Using public WiFi is not always best. It may be OK for surfing the web, but the latency and packet loss might be insufficient for real-time
transmission of audio or video.

Configuration

What are the minimum requirements for the Gromiles Talk client?

For bandwidth, we recommend 1Mbits download and 0.5 Mbits upload speed. Users can test their actual bandwidth using speedtest.net.
For hardware, we recommend a dual-core CPU with at least 2G of memory. We recommend any operating system capable of running the latest
versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla FireFox.
For browser, we recommend running either FireFox or Chrome. Why? Both browsers provide excellent support for web real-time communications (
WebRTC). Safari, IE, and Edge will work as well, but FireFox and Chrome will deliver better audio in lower bandwidth conditions.
In short, if the user is having any problems (such as audio is garbled or they are periodically getting disconnected), we recommend trying
either FireFox or Chrome. If the problems persist, it’s likely an issue with their network. Gromiles Talk will give them notifications to help troubleshoot.

Does Gromiles Talk offer permanent sessions

The Gromiles Talk server does not support persistent or permanent sessions where users can leave and return the next day, for example,
and have their slides and chat messages persist.
This is by design. Why is this the case? This design makes it easy for system administrators to upgrade or replace a Gromiles Talk
server without migrating/updating any database. As an analogy, the Gromiles Talk server works like a web server. When loading content
from web server, you don’t tell a web server “I need to load a file at 2:00 PM tomorrow”; rather, you just load a file when needed. The web
server responds to the request and, when finished, it forgets about the request and moves onto the next.
It’s similar with the Gromiles Talk server. The lifespan of a session on the Gromiles Talk server begins when a front-end sends a
create API request to the Gromiles Talk server. Once a room is created (the create request succeeded), users can join the session and
interact within the session. The session ends (and is cleared from the server’s memory) when the last person leaves, whereupon Gromiles Talk
Software clears the session from memory.
Using Gromiles Talk Accessibility
We designed Gromiles Talk to be accessible to users with visual and/or audible disabilities.
Gromiles Talk supports both JAWS and NVDA screen readers. When using a screen reader, we recommend using Internet Explorer or the
32-bit version of FireFox. The 64-bit versions of FireFox and Chrome make it harder for screen readers to interact with the Gromiles Talk client.
Gromiles Talk supports live closed captioning. A stenographer can join the session and provide a live caption stream to all users (you
can have multiple stenographers simultaneously providing captioning in multiple languages). Later on, when Gromiles Talk processes the
recording, it will convert the closed captions to subtitles in the playback.
Screen Sharing
What is needed to run desktop sharing?
Only the presenter needs to have Java installed to share their desktop. You can test if your system has Java installed using the following link. Screen sharing works for Mac, Unix, and PC platforms.
Can I share a specific window when sharing my desktop ?
While you can’t choose a specific window, on Windows you can share a specific region of your desktop and place the window within that region.

Presentations

Can I upload Microsoft Office documents to Gromiles Talk ?
Yes. Gromiles Talk uses LibreOffice 4.3 for converting Microsoft Office documents into PDF for display in Gromiles Talk .
If possible, for best results, save your Word or PowerPoint document as PDF. If you are using Office
2007, we recommend using Microsoft’s free download to enable Office 2007 to save any document to PDF: download link.

You’ll always get the best results with PDF.
Will my animations in PowerPoint convert when uploading to Gromiles Talk
Since Gromiles Talk must convert your PowerPoint document to PDF (using LibreOffice), none of the animations (visual or audio) will be
converted. What you’ll see is a PDF page corresponding to the final state of each slide?.
I uploaded a document but some fonts are missing after conversion
If you upload a PDF document, all your fonts will come through with the document. In other words, for best results, if possible always
create a PDF and upload it for conversion.
If you upload a Word or Power Point document that has special fonts, such as Chinese language, the document must first be converted by
LibreOffice into PDF. Unless you’ve configured the LibreOffice server running within Gromiles Talk to have the necessary fonts, then
you will see empty spaces (or boxes) for the missing fonts.
To add the Japanese fonts, enter the following commands on the Gromiles Talk server.
I can’t upload a presentation from Linux
We’ve noticed that on some UNIX systems, such as Linux (openSUSE 11.2 x64), when you click the ‘upload presentation’ button (lower left-hand of Presentation window), Flash will not let you upload a presentation.
If you encounter this problem, try the following:
1. Click ‘upload presentation’
2. Close the File Open dialog box
3. Click the (+) button next to the file name for the presentation (the File Open dialog box reappears)
4. Select a file to upload in the File Open dialog box
5. Click ‘Open’
6. Click ‘Upload’
These steps trigger the opening of the File Open dialog box by a user action, which seems to work better than the automatic display of the
File Open dialog box when there is currently no presentation loaded.

Does Gromiles Talk support mulit-user whiteboard
Currently, the presenter is the only person that can annotate the current presentation using whiteboad tools. A moderator can make any user presenter (including themselves).

Voice Conference

Why can’t others hear me in the voice conference ?
If others in the voice conference don’t hear you when you speak, it’s likely that Flash has picked the wrong microphone on your computer.
You can change this with the following steps:
1. Right-click within the Gromiles Talk client
2. Choose “Settings…” from the flash pop-up menu
3. Click the microphone icon
4. Try choosing a different microphone from the drop-down list
You see a volume indicator next to the drop down for choosing a microphone. Try selecting a different microphone. When you select the
active microphone, you’ll immediately see activity in the volume indicator when you speak.
Close this Flash settings dialog and others in the voice conference should now hear you.

Why is there an echo in the voice conference ?
In Gromiles Talk , we use the built-in acoustic echo cancellation, so in most cases, you should not hear any echo from remote users.
In any event, we always recommend that you have your remote users use a headset with microphone. This will ensure the best audio in a
session.
If a remote user is using a laptop with a built-in microphone, you should not hear an echo. However, if two remote users are using laptops
with built-in microphones and neither is using a headset and both are sitting close to each other (close enough for the microphone in one
laptop to pickup the audio from the speakers in the other laptop), then you will hear an echo. The reason is the built-in echo cancellation
only works with the audio coming from the host laptop – the audio coming from the second laptop will be picked up as an external audio
source.
If a student is causing echo, the best way to solve this problem, if you are logged in as a moderator, is to mute the user by clicking the
microphone icon to the left of their name.
Overall, the best solution is ask all users to use a headset – this will ensure no background noise or echo.
How do I get the best audio ?
Use FireFox or Chrome.

Both these browsers support web real-time communications (WebRTC) audio. Gromiles Talk will use WebRTC for audio if the user is on
FireFox or Chrome browser; otherwise, it will fall-back and use the Flash-based audio (which does not transmit as efficiently and may have a greater latency).

Chat

How can I copy all chat messages to the clipboard ?
Right-click within the chat area and choose the option “Copy All Text”.


In Gromiles Talk , the external application that uses the Gromiles Talk API can now pass an additional parameter record=true when
creating a session. This additional parameter instructs the Gromiles Talk server to record the session and make a recording available through subsequent get Recordings calls.
There is no user interface for the presenter to turn on or turn off a recording.
When instructed through the API call, the Gromiles Talk server will record all of the meeting, from the time the first person joins to
when the last person leaves. A meeting may also end when it reaches it’s duration or the end is called on the meeting.

What parts of the session does Gromiles Talk record ?

Gromiles Talk records all activity in the presentation, chat, webcams, and desktop sharing for playback.
What browsers support playback ?
Gromiles Talk supports playback in Chrome and FireFox.
In Gromiles Talk , the audio from a recorded session is encoded into Vorbis, an open source audio format that is not patent encumbered.
Playback of Vorbis audio is supported in FireFox and Chrome, but not IE and Safari.
Gromiles Talk will playback the webcams from a session using the WebM container, which, thanks to Google, provides a high-quality open
source video codec VP8. Playback of video in VP8 is supported by FireFox and Chrome, but not IE and Safari. See HTML5 video Wikipedia article.

Troubleshooting Connectivity

Users on Chrome get randomly disconnected
When running Gromiles Talk in Google Chrome, if the user is connected to both wired and wireless at the same time, and the wireless state changes (such as disconnecting or switching between wireless networks), Chrome sends a network change event to Gromiles Talk and drops the user’s connection.
If this occurs, the solution is to either disable wireless networking while using Gromiles Talk or switch to FireFox. FireFox uses
Adobe Flash Plugin whereas Google Chrome bundles the flash plugin within the browser.
Users on Windows 7 get disconnected after a minute
The default config of Windows 7 (and Vista) does “ICMPv6 Router Solicitation” while running the Flash client. Some routers discard the
Teredo packets, thereby causing the Gromiles Talk client to disconnect at regular intervals. One solution is to disable Teredo packets
in the client by entering the following:
$ netsh interface ipv6 set teredo disable
To run this command, you’ll need to enter ‘cmd’ in the program search field (available when you click
the start menu). When you type ‘cmd’, you’ll see the ‘command prompt’ appear. Right-click and choose “Run as Administrator”.
Client hangs loading at 100%
The Gromiles Talk client needs to connect to Adobe for downloading libraries. Clients will hang, if they connect to a Gromiles Talk server without internet connectivity.
On some versions of Linux desktop when loading the Gromiles Talk client, the user is unable to accept the Flash security dialog asking for permissions to access the computer’s microphone and webcam.
The solution is use the Flash security manager to add an exception for the Gromiles Talk host. Doing so will no longer have Flash
prompt for access to the microphone/webcam.
To add an exception, do the following.
1. Open the following URL in a browser Flash Security Manager settings. (This will open the security manager settings for the local
computer).
2. Click on the tab with screen showing an eye (Web Privacy Settings).
3. Look through the list for the hostname for your Gromiles Talk server.
4. Click ‘Always Allow’ radio button.
Now launch the Gromiles Talk client. You should no longer be prompted for the Flash Security Dialog.
I have 2 microphones and want to choose one to join the voice conference
When you’re inside the client, right-click, go to Settings > Microphone Icon > select your microphone, and talk to see if it works by
checking the volume bar.
Some users are experiencing audio problems
When using FireFox or Chrome, Gromiles Talk uses the high-quality OPUS codec that transmits and receives audio packets over UDP.
When using Flash-based audio, Gromiles Talk uses 16 KHz wideband speexs audio codec, which is a high-quality audio codec that
compresses very well. If you run a Gromiles Talk server within a LAN environment, you can get a sense of the audio quality. It should
sound much richer than a plain ordinary telephone system (which is 8 Khz audio).
To setup Gromiles Talk for external users, such as on-line classes, we recommend running Gromiles Talk on a dedicated (non-virtual)
server with 250M bits/sec bandwidth to/from the server.
Furthermore, we remote users have a minimum upstream bandwidth of 0.5 Mbits/sec and downstream bandwidth of 1.0 Mbits/sec.
Why can’t I resize my portrait document ?
Gromiles Talk is designed so the viewers of the presentation window are always in sync with the presenter’s view. It’s not possible for
the presenter to point at something and a viewer to say “I don’t see what you are pointing at”.
To keep the presentation windows in sync, when you upload a presentation (landscape or portrait), the size of the presentation window
becomes a ratio of the presentation. You and the viewer may have different sized windows, due to the sizes of your respective monitors, but
you both always see the same content.
For landscape documents, the “fit to page” approach works well. Monitors are landscape, so presenting a landscape document makes good use
of the screen space.
However, for portrait documents, the “fit to page” approach means that text is usually too small to read. The presenter can zoom in to a
portion of the document, but Gromiles Talk does not change the width of the presentation window itself – it’s keeping that ratio to
ensure both presenter and viewer are in sync.
We plan to add a “fit to width” option in Gromiles Talk in a future iteration, one that both keeps the viewers and presenters in sync,
but allows the presenter to better show portrait documents.