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

[Richard Dobson]

> > Why are you not doing the audio streams p2p? That would make far more
sense
> > IMO.
>
> That's and old story heavy discussed on the speex mailing list.
> P2P is fine for two enteties, but it doesn't work with more then two.
> It doesn't work because you to doing so means that every client have to
> send the stream to every client. Since we want to send video and audio,
> this is not really a solution. We have perhaps 10 percent of the
> bandwith for audio.

Ok thats fine but in the majority of cases for normal use each individual
conversation will only have two participants, we shouldnt be enforcing a
server based solution on those users when it isnt necessary. There is also
the matter of the hosting of these central combination servers, since they
will be quite bandwidth hungry they are not likely to be offered for free
meaning people would have to pay a subscription to be able to use them, now
why force this on people where it is not needed and it could be done p2p for
free?, also what happens when the server is full? no one will be able to
audio or video conference with each other at all, the server also becomes a
major point of failure and a possible target for a DDoS attack. Also
remember with broadband connections (and silence detection) there will be
plenty of bandwidth available for small group conferences, with my broadband
connection which only has 128kbps upstream assuming an 8kbps audio stream I
will be able to p2p group conference with over 12 people (using up 96kbps),
now that is more than plenty for normal people.

This argument so far seems to be mainly about people making things
complicated simply for the sake of doing it and not thinking about the end
users, if peoples use of existing systems is anything to go by 90% of
audio/video conversations will only be between two people (for real normal
users).

Richard