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Affordable and Usable Video Conferencing?
Sabalon writes "I work at a state university with remote sites, minimal space, and all the other usual bits. We used to have some dedicated-circuit video conferencing tools but those have fallen into disuse. The administration is now interested in being able to stream a class from site to site, or at least have a student at one site have visual interaction with a person at another site. My thought is that if Skype, uStream and others can do live video, there has to be some things out there that don't cost a fortune but work effectively. Key things would be the ability to use commodity web cams as a source, viewable on a PC (preferably all the main OSes) and the ability to add in other devices (say H.323 encoders) or desktop/application sharing. Are there decent products and solutions out there for us mere mortals?"
I work for a large retail operation. We use a product called ePop http://www.nefsis.com/ It's affordable and does the job. Or as I like to say... it's GOOD ENOUGH. ;-)
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
I recommend EVO
Being an audiovisual engineer at a large University in the US, I can tell you that Skype DOES NOT work well for group videoconferencing. Skype was designed to be used with a microphone and headset, and for that purpose it works great. When you try to blast audio through a room with enough microphone pickup to get everyone in the room, feedback is your enemy. In order to do videoconferencing *right*, you'd need a dedicated videoconferencing codec such as a Tandberg C60 or other device that has built in audio-negating capabilities. While costly, they do things marvelously well.
Who moded this interesting? Pidgin most certainly does video, I've used it, it works. Try it for yourself if you don't believe.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.