[JDEV] Videoconferencing with jabber

[Ulrich B. Staudinger]

Hi Carsten, 

there are multiple plans to do native transmission. 

Before starting to hack a solution you should think about broadening the
scenario ... it is very nonsense to do just one-to-one conferencing in a
solution ... 
and as soon as you start mixing streams the trouble begins and
performance costs on server/mixer side increase. 

in jabber direct i see no real chance to transmit the stream as an
inband stream. 

Between two endpoints there are many things like firewalls, routers and
the like, this leads to the only solution: a relay or a server. 

especially if you want to do voice mixing we will quickly run into
performance pitfalls. if we go speex for encoding/decoding, decoding and
encoding in realtime is no big deal on a modern machine. but as soon as
a machine has to mx ten streams for ten different people (mind, i don't
want to hear myself or a i want to mute people) [performance] trouble
begins again. GSM is much more performance friendly. 

I think the avrelay server i wrote 4-6 weeks ago works ok, with speex
and two - three members. of course the server has to be started on
jabberstudio.org (which we used to test this). 

another issue is (hard but true) that it's quite unnecessary to involve
the jabber protocol and do a lot of extra work to insert the audio/video
mixer into the jabber architecture. if a (video/audio) client connects
to the mixer component it can commmunicate directly with it, uneccesary
to go through jabber. 

just some thoughts ... 
i will try to release the latest avrelay server and client by the end of
this day. 


best regards, 
ulrich

p.s. avrelay url: http://greenthumb.jabberstudio.org/avrelay.html


Am Di, 2003-11-18 um 22.38 schrieb Carsten Breuer:
> Hi all,
> 
> im new on this list, so i want to introduce myself.
> I'm a software developer working for a big car company in germany
> (the fast ones) and i am part of the engine control team.
> 
> Topic:
> This mail contains some questions how to support videoconferencing
> with the jabber protocol.
> 
> Why i doing this:
> My mother live in california and i want to make videoconferences with
> her. She use WinXP and is never even thinking off to change to linux.
> My newest Windows is 98 and Microsoft doesn't support Videoconferencing
> between  98 and XP anymore. I was never happy with the M$ Netmeeting 
> stuff, because i have to nearly switch off my firewall  to let this 
> messy H323 in. But now this is really anoying because the want to push 
> the people to XP and i have enaugh of that. I have searched the open 
> source scene a long long time if someone change the chanlenge, but it 
> doesn't happened. So it was time for me to start up with my own stuff.
> 
> Why i dont like SIP or H323:
> The problem with these protocols is that they starts a second assynchcon
> connection on a unknown port. So i cant say the firewall waht to open. 
> As i know, microsoft switchs off the firewall for 30 seconds after a 
> H323 call is initiated. This is realy a bad joke. So one of my goals is 
> to have only some ports to handle the "small entity" conections. I like 
> Jabber ihere very much. It uses only one port and that's the way i like it.
> 
> What i want to have:
> - A messenger program to start up the connection and chat etc.
> - A video and audio connection with two or more people.
> - Server based video and audion broadcasting if the connection
>    is used by more then two people. The audio could be merged
>    on the server and  sent to each client.
> - Single or double port usage for the connections. Not more.
> - Firewall friendly.
> 
> My questions:
> - I have readed that jabber supports streams . Is there a way to
>    transmit audio (www.speex.org) and video (mpeg4ip?) within the
>    jabber protocol.
> - Are there any plans to doing so?
> - What do you think about that. Is it posible. What's about the
>    performance? How can it be made?
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot for any help.
> 
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> 
> 
> Carsten Breuer
> 
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