[rdtennent]

"need to find a server midway between all the users" Nonsense. Did you read my post? The server is in Montreal; all the clients are 200 miles west of Montreal in Kingston. Physical distance isn't important. What is important is ping time. When one tries to connect in Jamulus, dozens of public servers are suggested with their ping times listed. If none are suitable or one wants a private server, one can set up a server anywhere that provides good ping times to all the intended clients. In the multiple-ISP scenario I had to deal with, a server "midway between all the users" would have been useless, as would any kind of server-less topology.

"The only clear benefit to it..."? As I suggested, a significant benefit of the Jamulus model is that any of the clients can be "thin"; most of the computation is done on the server. You may be able to improve on this but disparaging it with silly criticisms isn't going to help you; there are thousands maybe millions of satisfied Jamulus users around the world.

[weepy]

P2P doesn't require any computation on any server - it's essentially serverless. It doesn't make much sense to me at least to need to compress everything twice and have multiple buffers AND have to manage a server.

[rdtennent]

Well if any of the O(N^2) connections has unacceptable latency, you'd understand why a server is sensible. Reducing computation won't improve latency in the connections. One has no flexibility with clients but a server can be located wherever good connections are available.

[weepy]

There is flexibility - in the P2P model if one of the clients has bad latency - their buffer gets increased to prevent drop outs. How is a server better in this scenario?