[PLUG] Raspi, Zoom, cameras, incompatibilities

Tom tgrom.automail at nuegia.net
Wed Sep 30 22:14:33 UTC 2020


On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:46:14 -0700
Tom <tgrom.automail at nuegia.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:35:11 -0700
> Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> 
> > I bought a Raspberry PI 4 and a CSI-port camera for a standalone
> > multi-application video teleconferencing system. 
> > 
> > The goal is a second standalone "appliance" that my MD wife can
> > use for patient televisits while using her main (linux) computer
> > screen to look at patient records, medical images, etc.
> > 
> > For now, she also uses her main computer (running CentOS and
> > Chromium) for Zoom, doxy.me, and other teleconferencing apps
> > that her non-computer-geek patients want her to connect with.
> > Some use an iPhone teleconferencing app that seems incompatible
> > with non-Apple platforms (big surprise ... not!).
> > 
> > A mess of incompatibilities and black-box-module security
> > vulnerabilities.  I do NOT want closed source application
> > modules running on the same computer as her patient records.
> > 
> > I had hoped the standalone RasPi could fix all this.  Nope.
> > 
> > I found RasPi user forums bemoaning the lack of Arm/Raspbian
> > modules necessary to run the Zoom app native on the PasPi4.
> > Only the Chrome/Chromium web interface works, with lousy video
> > and audio.  No complete and TESTED solutions mentioned on the 
> > forums, with the last despairing messages in late August.
> > And Zoom is only the first of many teleconferencing apps
> > that I hope to run eventually.
> > 
> > I suppose I can add yet another ALIX X86 single board computer,
> > and configure the RasPi and camera as a webcam connected to the
> > ALIX's third gigabit ethernet port, but that sounds like "too
> > many moving parts".  
> > 
> > So - should I hope for Raspberry Pi Foundation and the community
> > to negotiate with and produce Pi modules for Zoom and other
> > teleconferencing apps?  
> > 
> > Should I ditch the Pi and use an off-the-shelf Logictech webcam
> > with another Alix? 
> > 
> > What will be the least trouble in the long term?
> > 
> > Keith
> >   
> 
> Or Zoom could stop purposefully breaking federation with other XMPP
> servers, allow anyone with an XMPP client and jingle support to
> communicate instead of forcing everyone to use their trashy spyware
> binary blobs.
> 
> The worst thing about all these proprietary IM walled gardens is that
> they take from the free software community but they never give back.
> In fact, they leave less than nothing. They actively harm it when they
> refuse to be interoperable with the very technologies they
> bootstrapped their company off, like ejabberd and prosody.
> 

Sorry for the tangent. It's not going to work. The problem is not a
matter of installing some software module. The problem is that zoom is
proprietary and only makes binaries for IBM PC clones with amd64
extensions. The raspberry pi is not an IBM PC clone. It is a RISC
machine. Completely different computer architecture.

Most consumer computers are clones of the original IBM PC going back to
the 80s. Just with a lot of extensions to make it interface with large
amounts of address space. This is mostly due to the Microsoft Windows
monopoly over the years, as Microsoft Windows only ran on X86 machines
with a few exceptions such as NT4 workstation. NT4 workstation never
went anywhere since in those days if you were buying a workstation you
were probably going to use some UNIX variant on it anyways.

I believe even Microsoft themselves are trying to get off of X86 now,
but since their ecosystem is based on selling licences to binary blobs,
and almost all of those blobs were compiled for X86 they are kind of
stuck without a slow inefficient translation layer. If you want to run
a X86 blob on the raspberry pi you'll need to use something like qemu
with TCG (TinyCodeGenerator) which will emulate an IBM PC clone. I doubt
this is practical on a pi though and it will be awfully slow.

This is another reason why having the source code to programs you use,
especially if your livelihood depends on it is vitally important. If
you had the source code, you could (if the loicense also permits
modification) just compile it for a different architecture and run it.

This has been a problem for other systems too, including the Commodore
Amiga, as seen here if such a module were to exist for the pi would
would be similar to the KCS
https://invidious.honeypot.im/watch?v=W1KTRlFdT4I

My advice to you is if you need to run zoom you'll need to do it on an
x86 machine
-- 
 ______________________________ 
< A man's house is his hassle. >
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