We were playing the Jackbox series of games together, the other folks were participating in the game with their phones. There are various minigames with 5-50 second timers, so 10s latency is a lot. Some of the games have a special streaming mode which extends the timers, but not all of them and it's best played with regular timers anyway. Obviously for true action games, you absolutely need sub-second latency, preferably <100ms.
Discord mostly works for my friend group to play Jackbox games, though sometimes it's still noticeably slow, so OP's project is definitely an improvement.
Except for Jackbox Party games it's by far the best fit. It's even the recommended way to play online by Jackbox themselves and I've hosted Jackbox via both Zoom and MS Teams and it worked perfectly fine that way.
Other online games wouldn't fair so well but the dropped frame rate in Jackbox Party games does not hamper the playability of their games at all.
They recommend doing it that way, because what else are they going to do, post a tutorial on how to do it via OBS? I don't think so.
Maybe Zoom and MS Teams offer(ed) a better fidelity. For one thing, Zoom lets you share desktop audio along with the screen. In fact, apparently these days, Jitsi can do that too, that definitely wasn't possible when I tried it early last year. At that time, at least, the experience OBS -> Jitsi was definitely much better than just Jitsi. (And note that all of this was in Linux.)
You scoff but they did link to a tutorial on how to do it via OBS in their guide[1]. They just made video conferencing the first suggestion.
Also in that guide was Discord and Steam Remote Play. It's a surprisingly technical guide (but in a good way) considering the average audience that might read it. It feels to me that some genuine thought did go into that document.
> Maybe Zoom and MS Teams offer(ed) a better fidelity.
Maybe. Anecdotally I've not had any issues with Zoom whereas Google Meets often feels like it's both heavier on the CPU and feeds seem worse. However that's running Meets on Firefox (Linux), it might perform better in Chrome.
> They recommend doing it that way, because what else are they going to do, post a tutorial on how to do it via OBS? I don't think so.
I think you're being rather unfavourable there. The Jackbox developers have been pretty responsive listening to user feedback in the past. For example Linux support was added after several requests on Steam forums. They've also added other features like subtitles specifically for streaming via video conferencing solutions. So if Zoom / Teams / etc didn't work well then you can bet they'd have posted another workaround and/or a game patch since the alternative is they'd lose a lot of potential business in 2020.
As I'd said, I'd used it fine over both Zoom and Teams (multiple times on both in fact) and the only reason I even bought Jackbox Party games was because several different work colleagues (I think it might have been 3 different people) recommended it to me after they had played their own games (individually) over Zoom and other conferencing solutions.
I don't have any experience with Jitsi so maybe the issues you were having were Jitsi specific? Maybe, being a techie, Jitsi was already "good enough" but you thought you could improve upon it a little and ended up over-engineering a solution? (we've all fallen into that trap -- when you spend your entire life building enterprise solutions it's sometimes hard to take a step back. Particularly when it's something as fun as OBS). Or maybe there was some issue with Linux? All I know is that myself and everyone I know has had zero issues hosting using Jackbox's recommended approach.
