[JDEV] Videoconferencing with jabber / Re:[speex-dev]Videoconferencing with speex and jabber

[Alon Weinstein]

Richard Dobson wrote:
>>>Just imagine you have ten people in a conference talking with each other
>>>.... a peer would send ten streams to ten people, that's quite a waste
>>>of bandwidth IMO.
>>
>>True, but you don't *have* to do it this way. Perhaps some sort of
>>circular architecture -- put all the participants in a "ring" -- each
>>participant sends a message only to the next one on the ring which will
>>forward the message to the next and so on and so forth until the person
>>who sits before the one who sent the message gets it.
>>Anyway, P2P has lots of NAT-traveling problems.
> 
> 
> Yep but there are ways around the NAT problem in the majority of cases as
> already shown, but I do like this circular p2p architecture idea for
> conferences, seems like quite a good solution if worked on to work out and
> solve any problems.
> 

NAT traversal is a tough cooky in applications like 
conferencing-audio/video -- all the solutions I heard of are based on 
some kind of proxy that can be contacted without NAT, which means people 
will need to have some kind of mini-server they are connected to, and 
that means that the proxy could be required to handle alot of streams 
for many NATd endpoints.
There are ways to minimize the problem, by detecting if a endpoint is 
NATd or not and using direct connections when possible and proxyd 
connections when not, but that only helps handling the problem, not 
solving it.
I heard about some way of using UDP-wrapped-TCP packets to traverse 
NATs, but never quite got into it deep enough to understand how the hell 
it's supposed to work.


Alon.