"Always On" Impromptu Video Conferencing Solution? 53
TristanBrotherton asks: "We have several geographically disperse offices all over the world. I thought it would be cool to make virtual windows in each office, linking a display panel with a mic and camera to the same set up in each other office. You could place these systems in public areas and in meeting rooms which would allow impromptu video conferencing, and 'hey bob nice shirt!' taunts to improve communication between our staff. I know you can get IP cameras, but I am looking for a simple all in one solution that can auto-connect, negotiate the best bit-rate, and remain real-time. Cisco charge tons of money for this stuff, but surely there must be a way to make a reliable system myself. Cringely thinks this might be built into apples iTv. Rather than wait on that, I am asking Slashdot what they would use to build such a real-time conferencing system, has anyone else attempted a project like this?"
tried it (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a company that set up an impromptu video conference just between two cities 30 miles apart (Denver and Boulder). We chose these two sites because it was cost "effective" for that short a distance to see if video-conferencing worked.
It didn't. While the "conference room" drew heavy initial traffic, novelty was the bigger draw, not utility. We conducted several conferences and even with high-quality high-speed links video conferencing soon fell into disuse.
I don't know if today they still have that link, but I never felt it offered much in the way of effective communication and connectivity with other offices and I didn't know of any others who thought so either.
If you've got lots of money to throw away this might be fun for a while, but if you're counting your budget dollars carefully your money might be better spent on other communication methods. (Heck, with the savings you may be able to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007 for all.)
I don't mean to throw a wet blanket on the concept, but video conferencing is difficult. Face to face meetings require many interpretations of nuance that video conferencing just can't provide.
video conferencing (Score:1)
in my experience video conferencing sucks, and I'm talking 'proper' equipment over dedicated lines. As such do it on the cheap and see how you go. If it works for you, then spend more money.
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That's the best part about it! (Score:2)
Because video conferencing is ever-so-slightly less convenient than just saying "Bob, let's walk to the conference room", it discourages useless meetings. If the meeting was at all useful, it would still get conducted with the video link. A great way to reduce "conferenceitis".
I've used one, it wasn't all bad. (Score:2)
OverHear (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically:
That is all.
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It's the general public that is out of the loop.
More power for the kings, governments, and corporations, I suppose.
mac fanboy rant (Score:3, Interesting)
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Like two button mice, shift keys are available to Mac users, but most haven't figured them out.
iChat uses H.264, yay! (Score:2)
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With the new 24" iMacs it'll look even better and the have brighter screens and more powerful speakers.
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One Question (Score:2)
When you say "negotiate the best bit rate" do you mean "in real-time according to network conditions"? You could just run a webcam on some old piece of hardware, but you aren't going to get fantastic quality.
If that isn't what you meant, then just setup a realtime divx/xvid/H2.64(?) encoding (on more modern hardware) & just have a video stream from each location.
VLC (Score:5, Interesting)
It captured a directshow video source (in this case, a video camera connected to a tv capture card.). Told VLC to encode the information from the card into MPEG, then stream it across the internet, where it could be viewed with any client that could decode MPEGs.
Check the documentation, it's not an obscure use, the documentation is fairly strong.
All you'd need do is mirror the setup, so you have recording and transmitting at both ends. If you had multiple instances of the media player open, you could even have multiple streams incoming (and, I believe, VLC supports multicasting, though I didn't use this feature so YMMV).
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Re:VLC technical issues (Score:5, Informative)
* VLC has about a 1-2 sec. internal latency. That's just enough to severely disturb the flow of a back-and-forth conversation. (Recall the many slips of the news agencies when they started reporting over sat phone links). H323 conferencing units like Tandberg, Polycom, operate with about 0.5s of latency, which is just about the maximum a typical human conversation can tolerate naturally.
* Multicast works very well, just remember to set your TTL high enough to traverse all of the routers. Assuming all of those routers are set to pass on multicast. Unicast works pretty well too, or even unicast-to-multicast bridges and vice-versa (just remember the additional latency if you transcode too) Also, if you're using mpeg4 over a WAN, however, remember to check "Strict rate control", or else you'll get some pretty high bursts of bandwidth utilization over your set average.
* In a converence room where you're not using a headset, you need AEC (acoustic echo cancellation). This prevents your microphones from picking up the sound of the remote end from your speakers and sending their audio right back at them. Skype manages to do this in software, but VLC and surprisingly many other VoIP softphones do not (at least the last few versions of SJphone, X-lite, Netmeeting I tested did not). If you can't find any software AEC, you need to spend money on some decent AEC hardware that will sit between your computer, mic, and speakers, preferably one with noise reduction as well.
For all these reasons, plus documentation and maintenance we ended up shelling out the big bucks for Tandberg units instead. I've never been happy with the Tandberg video quality, though, even at high bitrates (2Mbps h263 or 768kbps h264). So we still use VLC for transmitting computer graphics (esp. 3D and animations) that go along with a presentation.
For your purposes, it sounds like video Skype or the Apple thing would give you the best results for little more than the cost of a computer. Anything more sophisticated and then you'd probably want to look at some good H323 software/hardware to give you much more flexibility with MCUs, easier configuration etc. Just mind that different manufacturers' H323 products don't interoperate as well as they should, so test first.
Skype? (Score:1)
I recently had to set up a kind of 2-way PA system in a public-use computer lab at the University of Rochester, where I attend school. We had several problems with people doing illicit (I'll leave it at that) things in the lab when the lab staff wasn't around (hey, 'lab staff' consists of 5 students who have lives outside the lab)
Now things ar
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We had an interesting system at the uni where I studied. There was a teletheatre with a PTZ camera. Each pair of seats had a microphone with a switch and when the mic was switched on the camera panned to point at that pair of seats. Whe
Netmeeting and its successors (Score:2)
Tandberg (Score:2)
Easy & cheap, except for the MCU . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Software: Ekiga on Ubuntu
Protocol: SIP? H.323? Whichever you can find a cheap MCU for (H.323 OpenMCU sorta works, don't know about SIP)
PC Hardware: Cheap ass, last generation PCs with TV-in cards
AV hardware: Cheap ass, last generation DV cameras with integrated mics and (preferably) wide angle lenses. You'll also need a tripod ( 1/8" inch headphone jack converter.
Hardware config: wire up the DV cam (audio and video) to the TV-in and MIC jacks on the PC.
Software config: Configure a user to auto-login, add an Ekiga call to your session startup (call the MCU, not a site - don't know how to do fullscreen via CLI).
Errata: You probably have firewalls. Firewalls screw with videoconferencing in many ways. Besides needing to poke the necessary port holes, they will timeout sessions after a certain number of hours. PIX's are notorious for this. Additionally, your MCU and clients will need to have their session timeouts set. You may just want to cron call restarts every 12 hours or something. If you use OpenMCU, remember it will ONLY work with the crap-tastic H.261 video codec.
Alternatively you may want to look at the open source ACCESSGRID project (warning: requires multicast - hope you have good network staff) or Microsoft's ConferenceXP ('free' for the time being). Good Luck.
Re:Easy & cheap, except for the MCU . . . (Score:2)
Happily supports multiple cameras, and we regularly have meetings with about 6 sites involved.
Several on products in the market. (Score:2)
iSight, iChat solution the easiest (Score:1)
After looking at all the brain bending going on here, I'll second the motion to use a Mac with an iSight (built-in or not) and iChat. Sorry, it's not expensive, difficult or proprietary (NetMeeting, indeed) but that doesn't mean it's no good (I know how you people think!). It's so easy, I use this system with my inlaws, for chrissake.
We have two offices and I set up one of these rigs in each of the public areas with essentially an "open mic". It was sort of the "window to the other world". After a day or
Ahem (Score:3, Funny)
Are they also internationally panglobal? To save on videoconferencing call charges, try removing the redundancy from your style.
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This is what you are looking for... (Score:4, Informative)
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steve
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Some hard core hearing impaired people are EXTERMLY HARD CORE.
To the point that they think babies that are hearing impaired shouldn't get surgery or hearing aids!
Most are not that hard core. To the really hard core ASL is their language and to have too use anything else is a violation of their rights.
It could also be an issue of speed.
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other low cost video conferencing solutions (Score:1)
I've been very pleased with SightSpeed [sightspeed.com], which will support a small conference (up to 4 people) cross-platform (Mac/Windows) at 30 fps. One-to-one video chat is free to registered users, but organizing a conference requires SightSpeed Pro, which is US $5/month or US $50/year.
I've also been watching DimDim [dimdim.com], an open source video conferencing startup. Their solution is still at the Alpha stage, so it is too ear
Yahoo Video + Skype (Score:3, Interesting)
Vbrick (Score:3, Informative)
We use them specifically to do what you're describing to do some surgical training. One box in the OR, another in a conference room attached to a projector. They even support a really nice echo canceling microphone, which normalizes audio levels no matter how far the people are from the mic.
The vbricks also have scripting, support SNMP puts and contact relays. So there are a number of different ways you could have non-technical people control the conference, if you didn't want it running 24/7.
You could buy the model with the internal hard drive, and have a big red button to start/stop recording the whole conference.
Best of all, they run a hardened RTOS. No patching the OS, updating virus software or whatever. It'll take under an hour to setup, including opening the box, and you won't have to worry about the things ever again.
Skype (Score:2)
Quit the video meeting = face meeting mentality! (Score:2)
Dlink i2Eye (Score:1)