My father just retired, and rekindled his interest in doing Video conferencing (He's in the UK, I'm in HK). So after a bit of checking for linux compatible usb webcams, I settled on a Creative webcam Live!
Set up was not to bad, it uses a spca50x chip, which builds and compiles quite easily. The only oddity was that the spcatools that can be downloaded from the driver site didnt appear to work. However, gnomemeeting and streamer displayed the output perfectly.
I ran into huge trouble though with networking and video conferencing, I initially set up gnomemeeting behind my firewall (eg. the webserver with ipmasq on it.), but after a few experiments it became obvious that the whole relaying of h323 video connections was increadibly complex, and really not worth the hastle. In the end I just moved the camara to my firewall/webserver/comms server (eg. it runs irc/gaim).
I did at one point get video conferencing working within the house to a win98 box with netmeeting, but getting the video to actually display in netmeeting was very hit and miss.
In doing all this, I wandered off topic and started looking at alternatives, the two big ones being SIPs and Skype. It's pretty difficult to get an overview of SIP, but by the looks of things it looks like it's not much better than the current gatekeeper type of concept of gnomemeeting/netmeeting. The only thing going for it is that all the hardware manufacturers have been building routers and phones specifically for this protocol. (I think there's even a free SIPS router for linux). But in reality it looked like it had the same architecture as gatekeeper, which was the core to the fundimental problem with this point to point via a special gateway concept. The gateway was always an extra consideration that was a hastle to set up.
Skype, is something that I've been hearing more and more about, and from reading their technical FAQ, they seem to have spotted the above problems and thought of a half decent solution, basically by turning Skype clients that have direct internet access into relays (or quazi gatekeepers), along with using P2P type technology to do the connections (eg. doing originating connections from inside firewalls, to outside, rather than trying to cleverly route external connections to an inside machine).
The only shame about the Skype stuff is the propriatory protocol and client, which makes it highly seceptable to an open source implementation decimating their market, and the fact that smart people cant hack the client to add nice features like video conferencing.
But I'm still waiting to see how my gnomemeeting works with netmeeting, lets hope that my parents broadband is not firewalled to death by their ISP..
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