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High-Definition PC Video Conferencing?

Posted by Cliff on from the don't-cross-out-the-travel-budget-just-yet dept.

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."

1 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Potential difficulties by Zone-MR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.