Slashdot Mirror
"Always On" Impromptu Video Conferencing Solution?
TristanBrotherton asks: "We have several geographically disperse offices all over the world. I thought it would be cool to make virtual windows in each office, linking a display panel with a mic and camera to the same set up in each other office. You could place these systems in public areas and in meeting rooms which would allow impromptu video conferencing, and 'hey bob nice shirt!' taunts to improve communication between our staff. I know you can get IP cameras, but I am looking for a simple all in one solution that can auto-connect, negotiate the best bit-rate, and remain real-time. Cisco charge tons of money for this stuff, but surely there must be a way to make a reliable system myself. Cringely thinks this might be built into apples iTv. Rather than wait on that, I am asking Slashdot what they would use to build such a real-time conferencing system, has anyone else attempted a project like this?"
I worked for a company that set up an impromptu video conference just between two cities 30 miles apart (Denver and Boulder). We chose these two sites because it was cost "effective" for that short a distance to see if video-conferencing worked.
It didn't. While the "conference room" drew heavy initial traffic, novelty was the bigger draw, not utility. We conducted several conferences and even with high-quality high-speed links video conferencing soon fell into disuse.
I don't know if today they still have that link, but I never felt it offered much in the way of effective communication and connectivity with other offices and I didn't know of any others who thought so either.
If you've got lots of money to throw away this might be fun for a while, but if you're counting your budget dollars carefully your money might be better spent on other communication methods. (Heck, with the savings you may be able to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007 for all.)
I don't mean to throw a wet blanket on the concept, but video conferencing is difficult. Face to face meetings require many interpretations of nuance that video conferencing just can't provide.
...but have you looked into using Flash?
There's Red5 as an open source streaming server, as a compiler you could use the open source haXe or the free-as-in-beer Flex 2 SDK.
Basically:
That is all.
you could go for a mac mini with isight. ichat sets up quick easy full screen video links. not super streamlined but quick and easy
I did something similar, using VLC.
It captured a directshow video source (in this case, a video camera connected to a tv capture card.). Told VLC to encode the information from the card into MPEG, then stream it across the internet, where it could be viewed with any client that could decode MPEGs.
Check the documentation, it's not an obscure use, the documentation is fairly strong.
All you'd need do is mirror the setup, so you have recording and transmitting at both ends. If you had multiple instances of the media player open, you could even have multiple streams incoming (and, I believe, VLC supports multicasting, though I didn't use this feature so YMMV).
For a while we had two workstations set up, one in Dallas and one in Northern Virginia, each running Yahoo Messenger hooked up to a web cam with Skype for audio. Skype was really good at handling the feedback you normally get with an open microphone plus speakers, but speaker and microphone placement was critical. The setup was eerily effective, and allowed people in the cubicles neighboring the workstation to yell across from one office to another. We turned it on the morning and left it running all day. Eventually the people at the remote office decided that the setup was a little too effective for comfort and stopped turning it on, leaving them free of annoying interaction with their putative colleagues.