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

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

1. Simple user-interface
2. Responsive user-interface, Works smoothly on Android tablets and iPads
3. Public and private room support
4. Desktop streaming and sharing
5. Instant text chat
6. Seamless WebRTC and WebSocket support
7. Customizable video quality
8. Full-resolution support
9. Docker support
10. Advanced room management
11. Ready to deploy on Heroku, DigitalOcean, AWS or IBM Cloud
12. Installation on Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, Fedora) is easy using Snap
13. Prebuilt Docker image
14. Full browser support
15. Turn Server (WebRTC Server) ready
16. 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

1. Google Chrome
2. Chromium
3. Brave
4. Opera
5. Mozilla Firefox
6. Safari

Supported Linux distros

1. Debian
2. Ubuntu
3. Arch Linux
4. Linux Mint
5. Manjaro
6. openSUSE
7. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
8. elementary OS
9. 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:

1. Python 3.7
2. Node.js
3. Docker
4. 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.

Resources

1. https://camus.chat/chat
2. https://github.com/mrgnr/camus
3. Snap download: https://snapcraft.io/camus
4. Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/mrgnr/camus
5. Docs: https://docs.camus.chat/en/latest/
6. Turn Server: https://webrtc.org/getting-started/turn-server

6 Best Self-hosted Open Source Video Conferencing Solutions for Companies And Remote Teams

Nowadays at the time of the outbreak, many companies adapt to working from homein several countries as a measure to reduce the rate of infection.“Working fromhome” is the new trend here, Companies like Amazon initiated this strategy fortheir employees which turned out to be effective. Video …

Medevel: Medical Open source Software ReviewsHamza Mu

Top 15 Open source Video conference and Team communication solutions

Enterprise video conference services are expensive, though they come with easeof use and implementation, the end-user does not own his data. However, thereare many enterprise-grade open source alternatives which come with powerfulcommunity support of developers and end-users. Open source alter…

Medevel: Medical Open source Software ReviewsHamza Mu

Top 6 Free and Open Source Video Conferencing Solutions for Education

Video conferencing plays a vital role to ease the educational process forlearners. Although Video conferencing tools were used on large scale for manyyears ago, their usage increased in the last few months because of COVID-19 andcurfew in most of the countries. These tools minimize the distance, …

Medevel: Medical Open source Software ReviewsMedevel’s Staff

Related Articles in Open-source