Beyond The Cell -- Journalists' Video Phone

dimitri_k writes: "This article from poynter.org gives some information about the video phone that has become standard in reporting recently. It uses H.263 for compression, and a satellite phone to call into ISDN lines. Maybe people on Slashdot can brainstorm ways to increase the bandwidth of these things in the short term (i.e. cost-ineffective combination of lines) so that the cable news networks can turn the grainy, live, night-vision shots in Afghanistan clear." This setup looks a little chunky, but when you consider the capability to beam video information from anywhere in the world, it's very impressive.

Comments

codecs and plastic instead of glass

[johnjones]

the problem is that most reporters use combi sat /POTS/ISDN and they hate technology

because it has to work anywhere say even on a rock outside kabul (sat)

that limits the bandwidth to 33.6 now you can do really well with open source codecs on 33.6

just recently :
On2 open source the VP3 video codec

On2 technologies have released their VP3 video codec to the open source
community. This provides the open source community with a high quality CPU
intensive codec to go with the real time CU30
codec which Cornell made available.

so it looks up its just putting a box togther that runs them which would not be all that hard if your box ran uclinux or plain linux (no porting involved yey)

so that what I think you should use

regards

john jones