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High-Definition PC Video Conferencing?
dsginter asks: "This year's spring Networld+Interop has ended with little fanfare. However, I noticed that a small nugget slipped between the cracks - HD video-conferencing. Two different manufacturers demonstrated such products which means that we'll probably have interoperability soon. After seeing the massive pricing estimates for such products, I couldn't help but think that I should try my hand at my own HD product (a Mac Mini, some H.264, a pinch of AAC and the glue that is H.323 or SIP). However, I'm missing one piece - a small, 720P camera for video acquisition. I've scoured Google but can't come up with anything suitable. Is there an answer? HD video-conferencing is an important step in complete communication between remote parties. While there will be those that joke about the possibilities, it is important to remember that the bulk of business travel still happens for the sake of face-to-face communication. HD video-conferencing might prove to be a panacea."
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I'm missing one piece - a small, 720P camera for video acquisition.
Good luck! Only several 'pro-sumer' HD video cameras exist nowadays, and neither of them could be classed as small.
I've recently bought a Sony HDR-FX1e camera - for recording some music videos for my brother's band. The recording quality (1080i, 3CCD) is absolutely fantastic. However I'm not sure about it's suitability for video conferencing:
1. The camera is large. I guess in a fixed setup this isn't a major problem - the camera could be positioned on a tripod next to the screen or preferably projector.
2. Video is sent via firewire as MPEG, at DV datarates (18Mbit or something like that). Unless you have that kind of bandwidth to transmit the data without recompression, you need to reencode the video on-the-fly. Reencoding 60 mins of video to 720p WMV-HD takes me 8 hours on a 3GHz P4. My system struggles with realtime playback of the full-bitrate HD MPEG. I'm not sure if any codecs could easilly transcode the stream in realtime without some expensive hardware accelleration.
Unless you're doing a video conference with some hot starlet, I do not see the point of this. Do you really want to see your out of state co-workers in high def?! How would that add to the meeting?
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Pray tell, why do you need HD for face-to-face conferencing?
I have installed videoconferencing at 6 companies over the past 15 years. It has never received the widespread use it was initially purchased for. Videoconferencing solves a technical problem. In a purely technical environment, they may be successful.
However, put a bunch of PHBs in a room and if they encounter any problems using the equipment, the liklihood of it being used again is slim. One thing a PHB hates more than anything is knowingly looking stupid.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I don't care how good picture and sound quality are, f2f (face to face - we're geeks ... we love letters) won't be replaced. No amount of video wizardry can replace flesh and blood (my apologies to spielberg and lucas). The screen will always feel like a wall with which one can hide behind creating a latent sense of distrust. Face to face is really the only level playing field for the truly important meetings.
"It's difficult to meditate on amphetamines." - Joe Walsh
Trying to decode an HD stream on a Mac mini is probably not that good of an idea - a single G4 doesn't have quite enough power to manage it.
H.264 is designed to scale down to various processor architectures, so a lower-resolution stream would probably play acceptably, but I rather doubt that you'd get enough horsepower out of a Mac mini to acceptably decode HD content encoded with H.264 in realtime.
For more, see Apple's H.264 FAQ.
An iMac G5 should have the horsepower, however.
The internet isn't quite fast enough for videoconferencing on a small scale to be practical. How on earth is HD-video quality going to shoot through the pipes fast enough?
I know, corporate environment with coroprate-scale bandwidth, but it all has to pass through the backbones like the rest of us.
We're not at the Max Headroom age yet.
What i want to know is if anyone here has EVER seen actual 640x480 (720x480 if using a DV camera) 30fps cleanly being done?
While iChat in Tiger is hella good, i'm still only getting 15 fps... and i bet money that it still remains at 15fps when i get two machines chatting on the same subnet. (anyone? anyone tried this?)
The idea of using a Mac Mini for this only means that the submitter, while well intentioned, is totally missing the fact that what he's talking about is impossible without additional hardware.
Can anyone give a quick review of iChat in Tiger over fast ethernet on the same network?
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"... it is important to remember that the bulk of business travel still happens for the sake of face-to-face communication."
Yes, and teleconferencing, not terrorism, is why the airline industry is in such a slump. I'm surprised teleconferencing hasn't been banned to help the airlines. I guess the airlines haven't figured this out yet and started lobyying.
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While I'm sure there are a few applications out there now, doesn't most everyone have trouble with regular videoconferences now?
The company I work for has videoconferencing equipment that works over ISDN as well as IP over their internal corporate network. The picture is still jerky, the sound is always off, and it's almost more of a pain to set up than it's really worth. Kind of like talking to someone via a satellite link.
Maybe mine isn't the typical end-user experience, but I'm wondering how many networks out there could even handle the traffic from a HD videoconference session.
Having better quality video isn't going to improve communication significantly over current capabilities. The value of face to face meetings will never go away. It's not what happens in a specific meeting that is so key, but rather the rappore that is developed around the meetings.
It's going into a room sitting down, shaking hands, chatting about the family before the meeting starts that makes all the difference. It's going out for lunch, playing a game of golf, etc, that build the real rapport. Talking over video conferencing does allow you to see body language, etc, so it's certainly an improvement over a mere phone call, but it is not even close to the same as being there in person.
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I've seen demos of the HP Halo videoconferencing rooms. There is no equipment for the PHBs to fiddle with. Everything (microphones, cameras, and displays) is built into the walls and furniture. With multiple screens per room and great sound, it easy to see why executives want to buy these things. Why fly (even via a corporate jet) when you just walk into a Halo conference room and be seated across the table from who you want to see/hear. See a Halo room write up at:l ogy/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000729994
http://www.presentations.com/presentations/techno
I'm kinda wondering if the PS3 is going to do this. Sony has been rather close w/Apple lately, and the PS3 is supposed to have input for an HD camera, as well as Gigabit Ethernet & 802.11 b/g built in...
As an engineer who recently wrapped up a video camera project, here's are the problems we ran into:
- The CCD sensor can easily do full-motion XGA or SXGA video, but:
- The DSP has a very difficult time encoding MPEG video at full-motion frame rates for anything larger than VGA resolutions.
- 100 Mbit ethernet is just barely capable of supporting a VGA or D1 bitstream, and,
- XGA has ~twice the number of pixels as D1; SXGA is even more bandwidth intensive.
Now granted, we do build boards which could probably handle HDTV video conferencing. But the problem is that the 4 processors alone cost more than the average low-end PC. From a technical perspective, HDTV video conferencing is possible, but the hardware required is far more expensive than what the market would tolerate.Are you willing to pay $10k for HDTV versus a few hundred for a QVGA webcam setup?
I'd love to be building HDTV cameras, but the problem is that we can't find customers willing to pay the extra expense for the higher resolution.
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First, how does the fact that two companies demo'd products of similar nature imply pending ineteroperability? It doensn't.
/. story - but I don't see how the story has any bearing on anything other than the fact aht HD videoconferncing is now possible. Thats it. It is as if the parent was just stretching for something interesting in an otherwise ho-hum topic.
Second, what added benefit is there to HD videoconferencing? How would this possibly be the pancea of people wanting to meet in person. They still aren't meeting in person so they will still want to. A pretty picture doesn't change that.
I've never posted a a negative reply to a
I'm missing one piece - a small, 720P camera for video acquisition.
The cheapest consumer HD video camera I have seen is made by sony. It costs $3,500. The size is about 1 foot long, 6 wide and 6 high. Not sure if it is 720p or 1080i. Doesn't matter much in this case. Now, if you want something that will give you the 1280x720 resolution, try one of the still digital cameras that can give you just as good a resolution (and sometimes act as a web cam). They generally cost much less. Concord has a camera that should work for this, assuming the webcam picture is full res.
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Still not exactly CHEAP, but $600 is at least getting there...
...out of a mac mini. I'm skeptical, anyways. I doubt that you can encode 720p H.264/MPEG4 in real time on a mac mini.
That, and the biggest problem with video conferencing in HD has more to do with the network transmission and upload speed. It's all fine and dandy to produce a product that'll work with a reliable megabit of upload speed, but most consumers don't have that much upload bandwidth.
Add that to the fact that most of these codecs you're dealing with are heinously intolerant to loss, combined with trying to stream them over a big, lossy, latent network (i.e. the Internet), and people will begin to get the picture.
I suck, I put specs instead of model number. The model is JVC GR-HD1US, but still nothing say an Apple I-sight HD if that beast were to exist.
We've had the tech for this stuff for decades and it hasn't really taken off in business because it's no replacement for 1 on 1 human interaction. It's just a phone conference you have to do your hair for.
Seriously, you can't get out of that stuffy breakout room and take the meeting to the bar if a change of scenery is required. You can't get a client to really open up to you regarding their needs if you're just a talking head.
The purpose of these 1 on 1 physical space meetings is interaction. Being able to play off each other. The only technological advance that will make this more efficient is teleporation. Maybe slacks that don't wrinkle.
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Peace
You should take a look at the Elphel 333 fpga security cameras. They can do real-time encoding in the free Theora video format at HD resolutions, and provide the stream over ethernet.
The cameras don't have sound, so you'd have to use the mac mini to handle the audio, and the image quality isn't as good as one of the "prosumer" HDV cameras. On the other hand, by doing the compression in hardware you don't have any resource problems like you would transcoding an HDV or component HD feed, and can concentrate on just decoding the stream. :)
Best, you'll be supporting free multimedia instead of the MPEG patent holders.
There's an article describing the camera if you want more details.
He states "H.264 is designed to scale down to various processor architectures, so a lower-resolution stream would probably play acceptably"
Yes a Mac mini can do H.264, no it cannot do it at HD rates.
Actually, running a mid-sized governmental agency with a small handful of field sites nationwide, we have immediate need for a system like this.
We're running semi-monthly meetings that are presented more like carefully timed television broadcasts then casual spitballing sessions. HD would be a GIGANTIC improvement over CIF.
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While I agree with you on this point, I also think that the first company that gets videoconferencing to work right is going to make a killing, because there's still no product that finds a usable middle ground between a phone call and actually being there.
The middle ground will have several streams (so you can see both the speaker's face in detail and the rest of the remote environment), will not need extreme resolution (i.e. bandwidth) except for occasionally transmitting a high-res snapshot of a whiteboard or some found object, and will have better audio than a telephone. It will require no more effort to connect to a remote conferencing station than making a telephone call by pushing a speed dial button.
I work frequently with people that I have never met, and though I've "known" them for a year or more I wouldn't recognize them in the street. I think there would be high value in being able to teleconference at least a few times with people I've not met, so that I can develop a mental image of who the person is. It would make working with them more effective in so many ways, even if I haven't played golf with them.