[Valnar]

This is off topic for the forum, but not for the people here. Somebody here should know!


After going through all the H.323 compatible programs, from Netmeeting to Ivisit to Cuseeme to OpenH323; I realize they are all the same. H.261 and H.263 video doesn't get any better no matter which program you use. (Netmeeting being the best since it can use H.263 compression, but still inferior)


Since PC's are powerful enough these days to handle better compression, are there any MPEG4 replacment video conferencing packages out there? I have found one and that's it. Something with decent video performance over ~ 128K of bandwidth? I'm really surprised this hasn't taken off, especially with the broadband explosion.


Thanks,

Robert

 

[Justin]

I believe it is difficult to use mpeg2, or 4 for vidconferencing because of the buffereing that is necessary, this cuases a multi second delay, which is un acceptable for realtime communcations.


BTW the best video conferencing software that I have used is MSN/Windows messenger which uses SIP instead of h.323. Although one problem is you cannot resize the video image.


Justin

 

[Valnar]

Is there a SIP alternative for us non XP users? I have Win2K.


Thanks,

Robert

 

[mdrobnak]

You might find this site interesting -- we're looking into using this in a college, but even for point-to-point conferencing it works pretty well (it has some bugs, as it hasn't even been "released" yet, but for where it is, it's great!)


It's called the Virtual Auditorium from Stanford University and a really cool guy named Milton Chen. Check it out:

The Stanford Virtual Auditorium


-Matt

 

[dm]

I use http://www.eyeball.com or http://www.eyeballchat.com


Traverses NAT firewalls well and the video qualityseems better than netmeetings. eyeball uses some proprietary video compression format.