Open-source

Camus Video Chat: The Open-source Privacy-aware Video Cat Meeting tool that you have been waiting for

Hazem Abbas

Nov 30, 2020 — 4 min read

Camus is a lightweight cross-platform real-time peer-to-peer video chat application. It's built with Python3 and ready to be deployed on server with simple few steps.

We have reviewed and listed several open-source video applications on Medevel.com, but most of them require time and skills to install and use. It's not the case with Camu which is created by a solo developer using several technologies to make it a good alternative for Google Meet, meet.jit.si and of course zoom.

In glance, Camus offers similar functionalities to the competing apps like text messaging, customizable video quality, high audio quality and desktop sharing.

It's also can be installed easily on any Linux distribution that support Snap or on a web server with Docker.

The main reason why do like Camus is its easy install as it takes far more time to install and configure than most of the alternative apps we tested and used before.

Camus video chat is created by Morgan Robertson, a developer based in Berlin, Germany. It does not contain any ads, trackers or scripts that harm the user's privacy.

Features

Simple user-interface
Responsive user-interface, Works smoothly on Android tablets and iPads
Public and private room support
Desktop streaming and sharing
Instant text chat
Seamless WebRTC and WebSocket support
Customizable video quality
Full-resolution support
Docker support
Advanced room management
Ready to deploy on Heroku, DigitalOcean, AWS or IBM Cloud
Installation on Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, Fedora) is easy using Snap
Prebuilt Docker image
Full browser support
Turn Server (WebRTC Server) ready
Configure custom STUN and TURN servers

Please note that Camus is still in active development by its developer and it'll gain more features with each new release.

Supported browsers

Google Chrome
Chromium
Brave
Opera
Mozilla Firefox
Safari

Supported Linux distros

Debian
Ubuntu
Arch Linux
Linux Mint
Manjaro
openSUSE
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
elementary OS
Fedora

It can be also installed on Raspberry Pi using Snap.

Install Camus

1- Snap install

To install Camus in any Snap supported Linux distro, just type the snap installation command:

sudo snap install camus

2- Docker

Installing Camus with Docker is pretty easy, especially with the pre-built docker image, you can check it here: https://hub.docker.com/r/mrgnr/camus. Using the next command as instructed by the developer, you will find a Camus ready at localhost:5000 at any installed browser at your local machine.

docker run -d -p 5000:5000 mrgnr/camus

3- Build from source

If you want to install Camus Video chat on your machine for development purposes, first make sure you have all the required software and packages:

Python 3.7
Node.js
Docker
Make

Then clone the project from its GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/mrgnr/camus.git

Then run the python installation script which will install all the packages required

pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

To install the Node.js NPM packages, head to camus/static and run,npm install Then you be able to go through all testing and running the project locally. For more instructions please review them here.

License

Camus is released under GNU AGPL-3.0+, as a free open-source application.

The GNU Affero General Public License V3.0 gives the permission for a commercial use, modification, distribution, patent use and private use. However, it comes with two limitations which are liability and warrant. It also has a set of conditions which include: License and copyright notice, State changes, disclose source, network use in distribution and using the same license.