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

[Mike Lehman]

This sounds interesting. Ray hasn't said anything  altely about it, but 
he's always gung-ho on tech upgrades we're usually not quite prepared to 
handle. If we can get the UC IMC website updated out of Dada, streaming 
from RFU, and mail issues sorted out, then this might be a good project 
to pursue, as it's come up before. It could really be useful to have a 
simple implementation that could be used between IMCs or as a feed for 
live video/audio in some way.
Mike Lehman

Stuart Levy wrote:
> 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
>>>       
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