Documentation, video chat codecs, contact lists editing
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Thread: Documentation, video chat codecs, contact lists editing

  1. #1
    Active Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2016

    Question Documentation, video chat codecs, contact lists editing


    where do I find more in depth documentation about ZxChat? The online wiki is sparse on details.

    Currently I'm evaluating ZxChat for company use in combination with Zimbra, a separate TURN server and various external clients/browsers, and running into various issues I can't find more in depth information on:

    1. what video codecs are supported (or is this dependent on what clients connecting to eachother both support?). E.g. Jitsi's Video call feature is greyed out (chat works), same for Pidgin. For Jitsi do I need to fill in the TURN server's IP:port/credentials in Jitsi client's config separately? (so far I assumed this was communicated to the client by the ZxChat server, where it is configured).

    2. how do you administer contact lists for other users? I've used the admin interface's option to add a distribution list's members to eachother's buddy lists, but would like to make changes (update the list, delete contacts, rename, put them into groups without user intervention etc.). If this is accessible via SQL, where do I find more info on what db/user/credentials etc. can be used for this, maybe table layout etc.

    3. debugging. I've increased the loglevels for ZxChat and reTurnserver but don't have information on what various error messages in the log mean (don't have time for looking at sourcecode, from what I saw it's not commented extensively).

  2. #2
    ZeXtras Community Manager ZeXtras Employee Cine's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Hello Zuser!

    1. While you can use XMPP clients to connect to the Zextras Chat server and use the IM feature, video calls are only available through the Zextras Chat Zimlet (based the WebRTC protocol).

    2. At the moment the only tools that allow admins to manage a user's buddy list are the features you've seen in the Zextras Administration Zimlet along with the related CLI commands - zxsuite chat do[add|make|remove]buddies. Feel free to share your ideas on useful commands and features as an RFE on the Zextras Bugzilla at!
    Manually altering Zextras Chat's database or changing its configuration by any other means than the Zextras Administration Zimlet and CLI is not supported nor suggested...

    3. Could you please let me know which Zextras Chat error messages you refer to? As for reTurn, that's a third-party software we don't provide support for...

    Have a nice day,
    the Zextras Team

  3. #3
    Active Member
    Join Date
    Oct 2016

    for point 2 I can work with zxsuite chat, except for two small problems: UTF-8 doesn't seem to be supported, when e.g. specifying a user1nick with accents it replaces those characters with a diamond with a questionmark in them. If I specify e.g. HTML style "&aacute;" notation, it looks OK in Firefox but prints it verbatim in Pidgin. I guess this can be worked around by simply not specifying nicks and relying on whatever is in Zimbra/LDAP (getBuddyList will still show questionmarks, but at least the browsers/clients show the correct characters).

    Secondly, since we have hundreds of users in various departments it would be nice to be able to specify groups from the CLI as well. E.g.:
    zxsuite chat doMakeBuddies "Management team"
    zxsuite chat doAddbuddies user1group "Sales Department" user2group "Sales Department"
    or if doAddBuddies can be expanded to handle multiple relationships:
    zxsuite chat doAddBuddies group "Sales department"
    regarding point 3 it's not so much cryptic error messages as debug info structure, e.g. why do I see 5 times the same message for video chat build up for one set of browsers and only once for others, or why does video chat not work most of the time, unless you make the browser ask for permissions to your camera on the receiving side (every time) and wait 10-15 seconds between accepting the video chat and allowing browser access to the camera. Please see the video chat topic for details:


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