Friam

Media Conferencing

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Owen Densmore

Media Conferencing

Administrator

I'm interested in finding a good way to hold media conferencing. For
one thing, we're starting to spread a bit here, with albuquerque
starting to be a locus of friamers. Also we have several "graduates"
both in the US and world wide with whom we'd like to remain able to
include in technology meetings. Finally, we're starting to have offers
for collaboration with groups that are similarly wide spread.

So this bring me to some sort of interesting media solution.

Certainly a conference-capable phone system is very important. This
may shortly be replaceable with VoIP systems which allow multiple
participants in a session.

Fax and email/web/pdf does well for sharing in non-real time graphics
and documents needed for the meeting, and even for sharing information
(slowly) during the meeting itself.

Video becomes problematic for a variety of reasons. Good cameras are
expensive and hard to use for most folks. Indeed, the conference rooms
at Sun were often "broken" because the video systems were so weird.
Using computer based systems can work, but tend to be platform-specific
and often do not interoperate well. Recent improvements in the H323
suite of protocols are fixing this, however, and may be mature enough
now.

As an aside, I find the iSight (camera/mic) from apple ($150 roughly)
surprisingly effective over broadband links. I've used it quite a bit
in multimedia chat and find it surprisingly useful. Possibly could be
used for meetings if Apple makes it work on windows.

So this is all to ask: Has anyone got useful information on affordable
media systems that we might consider for Wide Area Friam?

-- Owen

Owen Densmore 908 Camino Santander Santa Fe, NM 87505
Cell: 505-570-0168 Home: 505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net

Robert Najlis-4

Media Conferencing

Owen,

iChat should work with Windows machines for voice. I forget which
windows chat protocol you need. Maybe AIM.

Robert

On Jul 22, 2004, at 1:34 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> I'm interested in finding a good way to hold media conferencing. For
> one thing, we're starting to spread a bit here, with albuquerque
> starting to be a locus of friamers. Also we have several "graduates"
> both in the US and world wide with whom we'd like to remain able to
> include in technology meetings. Finally, we're starting to have
> offers for collaboration with groups that are similarly wide spread.
>
> So this bring me to some sort of interesting media solution.
>
> Certainly a conference-capable phone system is very important. This
> may shortly be replaceable with VoIP systems which allow multiple
> participants in a session.
>
> Fax and email/web/pdf does well for sharing in non-real time graphics
> and documents needed for the meeting, and even for sharing information
> (slowly) during the meeting itself.
>
> Video becomes problematic for a variety of reasons. Good cameras are
> expensive and hard to use for most folks. Indeed, the conference
> rooms at Sun were often "broken" because the video systems were so
> weird. Using computer based systems can work, but tend to be
> platform-specific and often do not interoperate well. Recent
> improvements in the H323 suite of protocols are fixing this, however,
> and may be mature enough now.
>
> As an aside, I find the iSight (camera/mic) from apple ($150 roughly)
> surprisingly effective over broadband links. I've used it quite a bit
> in multimedia chat and find it surprisingly useful. Possibly could be
> used for meetings if Apple makes it work on windows.
>
> So this is all to ask: Has anyone got useful information on affordable
> media systems that we might consider for Wide Area Friam?
>
> -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore 908 Camino Santander Santa Fe, NM 87505
> Cell: 505-570-0168 Home: 505-988-3787 http://backspaces.net
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9AM @ Jane's Cafe
> Lecture schedule, archives, unsubscribe, etc.:
> http://www.friam.org

Roger Critchlow-2

Media Conferencing

I'll pipe in with a negative. My wife was trying to use the voice
component of Yahoo IM for group conferencing a few weeks ago, but the
mixer component wasn't able to handle more than a few voices. When too
many people got on the conference, no one could be heard.

-- rec --

Russell Standish

Media Conferencing

In Australia, we use a video conferencing system called Access Grid
for fortnightly meetings around Australia. It allows multiple video
streams and distributed presentations. Access Grid was developed
at Argonne lab - see http://www.accessgrid.org. It uses open source
software, and commodity hardware. We built our node for less than
$1000 (Australian - about $750 US), but some nodes can be very fancy
conference rooms, with full wall size screens.

The main downside of Access Grid is that it requires true broadband
connectivity (Fast ethernet minimum, with multicast enabled). Various
tunneling solutions exist to get around the multicast requirement, but
they have their technical limitations.

As networks develop around the world, access grid should become more
mainstream.

Cheers

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 02:13:31PM -0600, Roger E Critchlow Jr wrote:

> I'll pipe in with a negative. My wife was trying to use the voice
> component of Yahoo IM for group conferencing a few weeks ago, but the
> mixer component wasn't able to handle more than a few voices. When too
> many people got on the conference, no one could be heard.
>
> -- rec --
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9AM @ Jane's Cafe
> Lecture schedule, archives, unsubscribe, etc.:
> http://www.friam.org

--
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile)
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 (")
Australia [hidden email]
Room 2075, Red Centre http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Tom Johnson

Media Conferencing

In reply to this post by Robert Najlis-4

Owen:

I'm about to start an evaluation of www.raindance.com to use in teaching
this fall. My understanding is that one can do shared-AV and
shared-document conferencing for 20-cents per minute. And that by
September, those live conference can be captured, stored and viewed at a
later date for free. I don't know if this might be over-kill for what you
have in mind, but I did a demo 8 weeks ago and was impressed. Yes, one
wants/needs to have broadband to really make good use of its virtues.

That said, the company is giving me a software license for a semester-long
test drive, but the company is new and might just be interested in hooking
up with a bunch of leading-edge folks like the FRIAM-istas.

-Tom Johnson

========================================================
J. T. Johnson
San Francisco State University
505.577.6482(c) 505.473-9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]
========================================================

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]]On
Behalf Of Robert Najlis
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2004 11:50 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Media Conferencing

Owen,

iChat should work with Windows machines for voice. I forget which
windows chat protocol you need. Maybe AIM.

Robert

On Jul 22, 2004, at 1:34 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9AM @ Jane's Cafe
Lecture schedule, archives, unsubscribe, etc.:
http://www.friam.org

Stephen Guerin

Media Conferencing

I've been using skype http://www.skype.com for p2p phone calls to Australia.
Very good quality and can support audio conferencing. It uses the same P2P
technology as Kazaa PC-only at this point though.

-Steve
____________________________________________________
http://www.redfish.com [hidden email]
624 Agua Fria Street office: (505)995-0206
Santa Fe, NM 87501 mobile: (505)577-5828

George Duncan

Media Conferencing

In reply to this post by Russell Standish

>From the Supercomputer Center at Carnegie Mellon, I gave a presentation via
access grid to sites in the UK. See
http://www.sve.man.ac.uk/General/Gallery/AccessGrid/GeorgeDuncan
Interaction was great with big wall screens featuring each of the sites.

George T. Duncan
Professor of Statistics
Heinz School of Public Policy and Management
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Phone/FAX: 412.268.2172/5338

-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Russell Standish
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 2004 7:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Media Conferencing

In Australia, we use a video conferencing system called Access Grid
for fortnightly meetings around Australia. It allows multiple video
streams and distributed presentations. Access Grid was developed
at Argonne lab - see http://www.accessgrid.org. It uses open source
software, and commodity hardware. We built our node for less than
$1000 (Australian - about $750 US), but some nodes can be very fancy
conference rooms, with full wall size screens.

The main downside of Access Grid is that it requires true broadband
connectivity (Fast ethernet minimum, with multicast enabled). Various
tunneling solutions exist to get around the multicast requirement, but
they have their technical limitations.

As networks develop around the world, access grid should become more
mainstream.

Cheers

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 02:13:31PM -0600, Roger E Critchlow Jr wrote: