Most of the possible contenders lack video calls and some also other needs mentioned by the OP. Nextcloud Talk has them all

Excellent summary

Voice chat works out of the box with Matrix.

It uses WebRTC and tries to do P2P connections. Note that this leaks your IP to the other caller and vice versa, but it’s also quite fast as you can establish a direct connection.

If P2P fails it will try to fallback to your configured TURN server and use that one for relaying.

However not every instance has one (as TURN servers are usually not that modern and straight forward…) and if this is the case it will fallback to Matrix’s global TURN servers.

XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.

Setting up Element Call on my instance was difficult on its own, I understand why Synapse doesn’t come with it out of the box, essentially you spin up Matrix’s JWT service for authenticating clients and it if approved forwards the connection to the Livekit ports which must be opened on your firewall (ie port forwarded), otherwise people will not be able to connect to calls.

Big PITA and in my experience, on my home network, can conflict with games with VOIP chats so don’t follow the default 50000:55000 port range Livekit recommends or you’ll run into issues like I did, each person consumes 2 ports so adjust the range to your need.

Edit: I don’t suggest running Element Call standalone, it has issues of its own, once you get Livekit and JWT running and follow This guide you should have your element call support in Synapse now, pro-tip for those running synapse behind docker and get confused on the whole ./well-known part of the documentation you can edit your ./well-known in your homeserver.yaml file like such:

serve_server_wellknown: true

extra_well_known_client_content:
  optional: client
  "org.matrix.msc4143.rtc_foci": [
      {
          "type": "livekit",
          "livekit_service_url": "https://livekit-jwt.your.domain/"
      }
  ]

I couldn’t figure out how to sign up for matrix server. Maybe there are peer tube videos.

https://matrix-construct.github.io/tuwunel/deploying/docker.html?highlight=voice#voice-communication

tuwunel seems to have some docker guides for how to set up voice & docker.

Have you Trier ESS?

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.

I feel like Matrix has gotten a lot of hate the last year or so. Don’t really know why. Perhaps people see it as being misguided.

i also have a mumble server but every once in a while we need streaming. what is your rtmp setup? i am thinking of mediamtx, but am annoyed by having to post the link to the stream every time and everyone needs to resize windows manually to fit all on ome screen.

Element and Element Call, although no streaming audio support on the horizon anytime soon.