"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?"

Comments

VLC

[The Mysterious X]

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).