: Netmeeting does allow the audio and video [...]
: VNC [is] great for the desktop but then there is no audio/video. Of
: course, you have to then consider the bandwidth issues currently with
: audio/video/remote desktop all going at once. You almost need a 10,
: really 100Mbit LAN to do it all smoothly at the same time. I wish I
: could find an easier way to setup videoconferencing... office and
: home included.
Use of the older mbone apps makes it much, MUCH easier to tunnel
audio/video through a NAT firewall; for point-to-point they don't need
actual multicast routing, and they normally only require a single
pre-set-able pair of UDP ports.
Also, an alternative I've done is to use VNC bidirectionally
(ie, you view your correspondent's desktop, and your correspondent
views yours), and then simply run a local video app displaying
the camera on the local screen. VNC updates the remote screen as
fast as it can given the bandwidth and latency, so you get
automatic adaptive frame rate thrown in gratis. Mind you, you
may have problems if the app you use to display your own
picture on your own screen uses hardware acceleration that
VNC isn't aware of; but that wasn't an issue for me.
And this VNC usage can be made to generalize; have the host of the
conference arrange to VNC out to everybody and show everybody's local
video on the host desktop, and everybody else just look at that desktop
with all its vncviewers running. Haven't tried it more than
point-to-point, but it should be workable, sort of. I imagine tinkering
with the window framing and vncviewer placement so video images wouldn't
"echo" back and forth annoyingly would be entertaining... it's enough
of an oddity in the point-to-point case (but again... it worked
minimally when I tried it to see if it was possible).
Finally, you could use udptunnel for multipoint multicast tunneling
using simple TCP ports, and set things up so multiple folks could use,
eg, vic to do videoconferencing, and rat for audioconferencing. Again,
like unicast vic, it can be redirected through firewalls, and encrypted
in transit via ssh, slick as can be; but you really need to have
multiple nodes on your home network, and run your conferencing apps on
one, and the tunneling on some other, for it to work well.
None of this is point-and-click-out-of-the-box... well, aside from the
bidirectional use of VNC and a local camera display app; that one's
fairly point-and-clicky... fairly. Vic and rat don't yet directly
support more "modern" (or at least more recent and bandwidth-conserving)
encoding formats like mpeg/mp3/WindozeMediaFlayer/RealMumble, though
they may eventually. And the windows versions of vic/rat have no slick
install mechanism last I used them; you get the raw executable, and you
need to figure out what options to feed it on the command line and "run"
it under windows. But with all these packaging shortcomings, vic/rat
have the virtue that they are simple and they work. It is all do-able,
(I've done all of these with both linux and windows, including
multipoint conferencing from behind a NAT firewall), and simpler than
trying to deal with H323.
Oh, and I almost forgot; you'll often get much much better audio quality
if you supplement with a vanilla POTS phone conference call, and use vic
or bidirectional VNC for video and/or desktop, without rat. Nothing
like good old ma bell for getting rid of packet drop and network jitter
and bandwidth problems for the audio portion of your program...
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~lennox/udptunnel/
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/vic/
http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/rat/
Wayne Throop [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the line:
'unsubscribe vnc-list' in the message BODY
See also: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/intouch.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------
