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Everyone on the Same Page: Synchronized Video Playback in Your Meetings

· 4 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

You have a video you need to discuss with your team—a new marketing ad, a training module, or a customer testimonial. What do you do?

The usual options are frustrating. If you share your screen, you're often left with a choppy, low-resolution video and distorted audio. If you paste a link in the chat, everyone watches at their own pace, making it impossible to pause and say, "Let's talk about what happens at the 1:32 mark."

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe watching a video together should be a seamless, collaborative activity. That's why we built the "Play External Video" feature—a powerful tool that synchronizes video and audio playback for every participant, turning passive viewing into an active, shared experience.

Breaking Down Language Barriers: Real-Time Translation and Live Captions in Your Video Meetings

· 4 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

In today's hyper-connected world, your team, your classroom, or your community isn't in one city; it's in every corner of the globe. A project update might involve team members from Berlin, Tokyo, and São Paulo. A university lecture could have students tuning in from a dozen different countries.

This creates a huge, unspoken barrier. When everyone is forced to communicate in a single language, who is being left out? Who is hesitant to speak up? Who is missing the critical details?

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe that technology should break down these barriers, not create new ones. That's why we built a powerful, integrated Live Captions and Real-Time Translation feature. It’s a tool designed to transform your video meetings from a one-language monologue into a truly global, multilingual conversation.

Beyond the Chat: How to Engage Your Audience and Make Decisions with Live Polls

· 4 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

You're hosting a webinar and ask a critical question: "Does this new feature seem useful to you?" The response? A few scattered "yes" messages in the chat, buried between "hello from Brazil" and a question about something else entirely. You have no real data, no clear consensus, and no way to gauge the true opinion of your audience.

Text chat is great for conversation, but it's a terrible tool for structured feedback.

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe that understanding your audience shouldn't be a guessing game. That's why we built a simple, powerful Live Polling feature directly into the core meeting experience. It's the definitive tool for transforming a passive audience into active participants and for making data-driven decisions in real-time.

What Does 'Free Video Conferencing' Really Cost You?

· 4 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

When you search for "free video conferencing," you're looking for a simple, cost-effective way to connect with your team, clients, or community. The internet is full of "free" tiers from major SaaS providers, and they seem like the perfect solution.

But what is the true cost of "free"?

Too often, the price isn't on the invoice; it's hidden in the terms of service. You pay with your data, your brand identity, and your control. This article explores the hidden costs of "free" video conferencing and introduces a better, more empowering alternative.

From Lecture to Collaboration: A Deep Dive into Mastering Breakout Rooms

· 4 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

We’ve all been in a large online meeting where the presenter asks, "Any questions or ideas?" and is met with a wall of silent, black squares. In a big group, people are often hesitant to speak up, and true brainstorming is nearly impossible. The meeting becomes a one-way lecture, not a two-way collaboration.

How do you spark real discussion and teamwork when you have dozens of people in one virtual space? You break it down.

At Plug-N-Meet, we've built a powerful and intuitive Breakout Rooms feature that allows you to seamlessly split a large meeting into smaller, focused groups. It's the ultimate tool for transforming a passive audience into active, engaged participants.

How to Add No-Code Video Conferencing to Your Moodle Courses

· 4 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

As an educator using Moodle, your goal is to create engaging and effective learning experiences. You want to add live, interactive video classes to your courses, but the options can be frustrating. You're either stuck with complex tools that require technical help, or you're forced to send your students to an external platform like Zoom, breaking the seamless flow of your course.

What if you could add a powerful, interactive virtual classroom directly to your Moodle course as easily as adding a quiz or a forum?

With the official Plug-N-Meet plugin for Moodle, you can. You don't need to be a developer, and you don't need to write a single line of code. This article will show you how to create a fully integrated, no-code video conferencing service right inside your Moodle site.

From Chaos to Control: A Moderator's Guide to Managing Any Meeting with Lock Settings

· 4 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

If you've ever hosted an online meeting, you know the feeling. You're in the middle of a critical point, and suddenly someone's dog starts barking through an unmuted microphone. Or, just as you're about to share your screen, an attendee accidentally shares their own, derailing the entire presentation.

A successful meeting isn't just about good content; it's about good management. The difference between a chaotic, unprofessional session and a smooth, engaging one often comes down to a single question: who is in control?

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe the host should always have the power to direct the flow of their meeting. That's why we built a simple but incredibly powerful Room Lock Settings panel. Think of it as your command center, allowing you to instantly transform the dynamic of your room to fit any situation.

Building a HIPAA-Compliant Telehealth Platform with an Open-Source Core

· 4 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

The digital transformation of healthcare is accelerating, but for telehealth providers, the choice of communication technology is fraught with risk. Using off-the-shelf video conferencing tools can create a compliance nightmare. How do you ensure patient data is secure? How do you sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with a public cloud vendor whose data practices are a black box? How do you create a seamless, trusted experience for your patients?

The answer is to own your stack.

Building a telehealth platform requires a foundation of absolute control over your data and infrastructure. This is why forward-thinking healthcare companies are turning to self-hosted, open-source platforms like plugNmeet to serve as the secure communication core for their applications. This article explains how.

Beyond the Logo: What True White-Label Video Conferencing Looks Like

· 4 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

The term "white-label" is used a lot in the software world. Too often, it simply means you can replace the provider's logo with your own. You're still stuck with their user interface, their workflow, and their branding on the URL. It’s like putting your own sign on a franchise restaurant—it might have your name on the door, but it's still their kitchen and their menu.

At plugNmeet, we believe true white-labeling is not about hiding our brand; it's about empowering you to build your own.

Our platform is designed not as a finished product to be re-skinned, but as a flexible canvas for you to create a deeply integrated, pixel-perfect communication experience that feels like a native part of your application. This article explores the three levels of customization that make this possible.

Hosting a 1000-Person Event? Don't Put Them All in One Room.

· 6 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

We get the question all the time: "Can Plug-N-Meet support 3,000 attendees in a single meeting?"

The dream is huge: a massive online conference, a global product launch, or an all-hands meeting for a thousand-person company. The first instinct is to find a tool that can cram everyone into one giant virtual room.

But let me be honest: from years of experience in this industry, that approach is a technical and financial nightmare. It's a recipe for chaos, spiraling infrastructure costs, and a poor user experience.

The good news? There's a much smarter, more professional, and incredibly cost-effective way to do it. And you can do it with Plug-N-Meet.

Why We Built Plug-N-Meet: A Founder's Story

· 6 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

For years, our company has been a well-known provider of BigBlueButton hosting and support services. We've deployed, managed, and scaled it for countless clients, and we have a deep respect for the role it has played in the open-source education community. It paved the way.

But after years in the trenches, supporting live sessions, online classes, and events at scale, we found ourselves running into the same fundamental walls. We weren't just using the software; we were experiencing its architectural limits firsthand. The frustration wasn't just about bugs; it was about an architecture that, while powerful for its original purpose, presented challenges for the kind of elastic scalability and developer agility that modern web applications demand.

We realized we had a choice: continue building workarounds, or take everything we had learned and build the solution we knew our users needed.

We chose to build. This is the story of why Plug-N-Meet exists.

The Anatomy of a Perfect Online Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide

· 5 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

We've all been there: an "interactive workshop" that's just a 90-minute video call with a slide deck. The host struggles to juggle different apps for polls, group activities, and notes, while the audience slowly disengages.

An online workshop shouldn't be a passive presentation. It should be a dynamic, collaborative experience. But to achieve that, you need more than just a video link; you need an integrated toolkit where every feature works together seamlessly.

With Plug-N-Meet, you have that toolkit. This guide will walk you through the anatomy of a perfect online workshop, showing how to use a single, unified platform to manage every stage of your event, from the initial icebreaker to the automated follow-up.

Your Session, Your Browser: How We Use Client-Side Storage for Privacy and Resilience

· 3 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

We’ve all felt that moment of panic. You’re in an important online meeting, the chat is full of crucial links, and then you accidentally hit refresh. Everything is gone. To solve this, many applications store your entire session on their backend servers. This allows them to restore your session, but it comes at a huge cost: your sensitive data is now stored permanently on someone else's hard drive.

At plugNmeet, we believe this is the wrong trade-off. We've made a deliberate architectural choice to use your browser's own storage to provide a resilient experience without compromising your privacy.

Our philosophy is simple: if we don't need the data on our server to make the service work, we don't touch it.

Our Philosophy on Recordings: Why We Capture the Whole Picture

· 5 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

What is a meeting recording? Is it just a collection of video and audio streams? Or is it a faithful replica of a live, interactive experience?

At Plug-N-Meet, we believe a recording should be a perfect, trustworthy artifact. When you watch it back, the whiteboard annotations should appear at the exact moment the speaker was discussing them. The chat messages should pop up in perfect sync with the conversation. The shared presentation should be exactly as the audience saw it.

To achieve this perfect fidelity, we made a deliberate architectural choice for our recorder: we record the final, rendered output, not just the individual parts. This article explains why this headless Chrome-based approach, while CPU-intensive, is fundamentally better and more reliable than the alternatives.

Who Holds the Keys? A Guide to plugNmeet's End-to-End Encryption Models

· 5 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

In the world of secure communication, End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is the gold standard. It ensures that only the participants in a conversation can decrypt and view the media streams, not even the server itself. At plugNmeet, we've implemented a robust E2EE model based on the WebRTC Insertable Streams API.

But "E2EE" isn't a single, one-size-fits-all solution. A critical question remains: where do the encryption keys come from, and who manages them?

plugNmeet offers two distinct models for managing E2EE keys, controlled by a simple setting: enabled_self_insert_encryption_key. Understanding the difference is key to choosing the right security posture for your application.

A Major Leap Forward: Announcing the Next Generation of Plug-N-Meet

· 6 min read
Jibon L. Costa
Founding developer

We are thrilled to announce a landmark update for the Plug-N-Meet ecosystem, featuring a completely redesigned client and a more powerful, scalable recorder. These updates are the result of countless hours of development aimed at enhancing user experience, boosting performance, and providing developers with even more flexibility.

We're aiming to publish the new client before Christmas, but you don't have to wait to see what's coming. You can preview the future right now! Just click the "Demo" link from our website's main menu and select the "Development version" to get a sneak peek.

Let's dive into what’s new.

How to Launch Your Own Video Conferencing Service with Joomla (No Code Required)

· 5 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

Have you ever dreamed of launching your own online service or "micro-SaaS," but felt blocked by the biggest hurdle: coding? You're not alone. The idea of building, managing, and scaling a software product is daunting.

But what if you could create a fully branded, monetized, and professional video conferencing service using a tool you already know and trust?

With the power of Joomla and the plugNmeet component, you can. This guide will walk you through the simple, step-by-step process of launching your own white-label video conferencing service, without writing a single line of code.

How to Launch Your Own Video Conferencing Service with WordPress (No Code Required)

· 5 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

Have you ever dreamed of launching your own online service or "micro-SaaS," but felt blocked by the biggest hurdle: coding? You're not alone. The idea of building, managing, and scaling a software product is daunting.

But what if you could create a fully branded, monetized, and professional video conferencing service using a tool you probably already use every day?

With the power of WordPress and the plugNmeet plugin, you can. This guide will walk you through the simple, step-by-step process of launching your own white-label video conferencing service, without writing a single line of code.

Looking for Open Source Webinar Software? Here’s Why You Need a Platform, Not Just a Tool.

· 6 min read
Bob Teng
Developer Advocate

When you search for open source webinar software, you're looking for more than just a way to talk to people online. You're looking for control. You want to own your brand, manage your audience, and create a unique, professional presentation without being locked into the expensive, rigid ecosystem of proprietary tools like Zoom Webinars or GoToWebinar.

Many open-source projects offer a basic meeting experience. But a webinar is not just a meeting. It has a different structure, different roles, and different goals. You need a platform that understands this distinction.

At plugNmeet, we believe the best webinar experience isn't a one-size-fits-all tool. It's a flexible, API-first platform that gives you the building blocks to create the exact webinar workflow you need. This article explains how.

Meet Users Where They Are: Why We Build Plugins, Not Another Standalone App

· 4 min read
Chaboud Simon
Community & Marketing Lead

If you manage a Learning Management System (LMS) like Moodle or a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, you've likely faced this frustrating scenario: you have a vibrant community, a rich content library, and a well-defined user base, but the moment you need to host a live class or a webinar, you have to send everyone away to a third-party, standalone application.

You generate a Zoom link, post it on your site, and hope your users can find it, log in correctly, and navigate back when it's over. This experience is clunky, disjointed, and it breaks the seamless learning environment you've worked so hard to build.

At plugNmeet, we believe this is a fundamentally flawed workflow. That's why we made a deliberate architectural choice: to be a plugin-first platform, not just another standalone app.