I do a lot of professional videoconferencing installations. The only way to get respectable frame rates at "domestic" i.e. 128k ISDN and size greater than a postage stamp is to use heavy-duty hardware codecs at each end. The routing issues with the internet produce so many out-of-order packets that lot of the stuff you cram down the line is discarded as expired. Doing the codec in software is cheaper but results in great compromises in frame rate, image size and audio/video quality. Unfortunately a lot of what is sold as "internet videoconferencing" is little more than a webcam taking sequential frames as fast as it can. For detailed info on VC, visit www.picturetel.com. On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Jon Pennington wrote:
Chris Reeves <chris.reeves@iname.com> said:
First off is the speed of internet connection. Currently we're on a 56k dialup
<cringe> yuk! </cringe> If you're in the states, ADSL and Cable are the best options as far as price/performance. Even a dual-channel ISDN (128k) provides mediochre bandwidth and would be pretty expensive compared to cable. Even a fractional T1 would make more sense cost-wise if this is to be a daily, extended operation.
Second - since the other users are currently using Windows as their OS of 'choice' ;-) they will probably end up using MS NetMeeting for the actual videoconferencing.
I think there are a couple of projects. Don't recall what they're called :(.
Number three (I almost forgot this one) - what sort of hardware would you suggest for this?
Huappage WinTV PCI capture cards, preferably with a CCD with composite output (~$150 US per-seat). PPA and USB cameras have shady support right now, with USB being the lesser of the two evils (higher bandwidth=better image quality). The kicker with USB devices is the lack of support at the kernel issue.
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