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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."
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
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
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.
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
> How on earth is HD-video quality going to shoot through the pipes fast enough?
...do you hear us??? Desktop/laptop H.264 dedicated encoding hardware for FCP/Compressor users!!! We'll buy it if its under $500)
easy.
decent quality standard def video at 30fps is quite wonderful at 768k... with "talking head" type content, 512kbps is freaking overkill, if you want to know the truth. (yes, i've spent the last week at work doing all kinds of encoding testing, since we're going to be moving to h.264 for our engineering video for our customers)
As for HD content... H.264 can make clean HD content flow at as low as 2mbps at 720p... so nice it makes you do a double take. With 100 meg ethernet being the low end standard... you can do the math as to how HD content is going to shoot thru pipes. Hell, many people get pretty decent speeds over their cable modems these days...
the bigger problem is still the encoding/decoding. Well, its a problem now.. but i'm waiting for a H.264 Firewire thumb-drive gizmo that will do it all for you offline using one of TI's h.264 encoder chips. I'm ready for hardware H.264 encoding for my Mac that's QuickTime/Compressor-ready...
(APPLE... TI.... 3rd PARTY DEVELOPERS
for those of you interested in actual products which exist now - check this link. They have everyone's stuff listed here, including Polycom's new stuff.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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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Still not exactly CHEAP, but $600 is at least getting there...