[IMC-Tech] Fwd: IMC Mexico, IMC South Africa, IMC Honduras... (teleconferencing software)

[Stuart Levy]

On Mon, Sep 04, 2006 at 03:05:15PM -0500, Gary Cziko wrote:
> I have a usb webcam that could be used for this.
> 
> We would probably need to have a pretty fast machine to make the  video work
> smoothly. This would require some serious organization and coordination at
> both ends.

[Don't know whether this has already been hashed through, as
the original request below was sent to IMC-Tech in mid-July!]


The mid-1990s-era mbone tools from Lawrence Berkeley Labs -- "vic" (video)
and "vat", or better the UCL "rat" (audio), and "wb" or "wbd" (whiteboard
for shared text/drawing) -- work well on very modest machines by today's
standards, and with modest bandwidth, like a couple hundred kilobits/sec.
You don't get full-resolution video that way -- 320x240 is more like it --
but that's OK for many purposes.  I think vic uses H.323.

University College London had a project to modernize these packages;
they're still available at:

    http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/

There's also a user-friendly-but-registration-required packaging of them
at http://www.vrvs.org/   .  The high-energy physics (DoE) community
set this up to allow talking among themselves; they don't seem to mind
who uses it, but people do have to register themselves to participate/create
conferences, and the video/audio traffic all bounces off central servers,
which some people might prefer to avoid.

But if you just run the component programs, they'll happily work
point-to-point; for example,

   (on machine hostA)
      vic  hostB/35000 &
      rat  hostB/35002 &

   (on machine hostB)
      vic  hostA/35000 &
      rat  hostA/35002 &

The hosts and network firewalls need to allow access to and from
even/odd pairs of UDP ports -- in this case, the four ports from
35000 through 35003.

For more than two participants, someone could set up a reflector
machine somewhere to bounce the traffic (there are several pieces
of code available; I've written a simple one); or, if we're
fortunate, IP multicasting might work.


There's also at least one Unix/Linux tool that interoperates
with M$ Netmeeting, namely gnomemeeting. 

> >---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >From: Raymond Morales <morales4 at uiuc.edu>
> >Date: Jul 16, 2006 1:29 PM
> >Subject: IMC Mexico, IMC South Africa, IMC Honduras...
> >To: Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net>, imc at ucimc.org, "prairie\""
> ><"billtaylor>, Lynsee Melchi < lynseemelchi at gmail.com>
> >
> >Video Teleconferencing Request
> >
> >I was thinking that we need to set up teleconferencing ability at the
> >IMC. We need to have it so families can rent it out to talk to family
> >members at other IMCs. Is this already possible?
> >
> >-Ray