[Cialug] OT: Video Conferencing

[Stuart Thiessen]

Being deaf, I do a lot of one-to-one video communication using DLink 
i2eye videophones. They work pretty nicely for a low cost situation. 
You can get them with a wide angle camera or a regular camera. They do 
use H.323 for communication so your firewall will need to know how to 
route that, put it in your DMZ, or you can simply leave it outside the 
firewall. They hook up to your TV using standard RCA video and audio 
adapters which means you can also connect it to your video projector to 
use it with a larger group. I use it to communicate with deaf 
colleagues or use Video Relay Service to talk with hearing people using 
a sign language interpreter over video.

I think you can get an i2eye for about $250. You need probably at least 
512Mbps bandwidth available for a quality picture. And of course for 
this route, you must have one IP address for each VP that you want to 
receive calls on.  Calling out, you can have as many as you want (and 
your bandwidth can support).

This is the low cost route ... nothing fancy, but it works well for 
what I need to do.

Hope this helps.

Stuart Thiessen

On Aug 27, 2005, at 8:32, Kenneth Ristau wrote:

> If price isn't an object, I'd say go the polycom route.  I set one of
> these up over ISDN lines about 4 or 5 years ago.  Nice features.  If 
> the
> room isn't to echo-y, you can program them to pan-tilt-zoom to the
> current person speaking.  The controls are easy to operate for 
> non-techy
> types (taught our COO how to use it in about 5 minutes and never got a
> call for help unless the actual ISDN was having issues).
>
> I've not kept on top of contemporary video conferencing tech (after 
> all,
> 4 or 5 years is an ETERNITY), but I'm pretty sure h.323 is still _the_
> standard for video conferencing.
>
> Nathan C. Smith wrote:
>> Anybody set up and manage a business-style conference-room video
>> conferencing system?  What are the requirements to allow for the 
>> greatest
>> interoperability with the video conferencing systems of other 
>> companies or
>> organizations?  Or is interoperability even possible?
>>
>> Is h.323 _the_ standard?
>> Do you just buy a polycom system of some type and have done with it?
>>
>> At our firm this has always been a chicken & egg problem: we have no 
>> client
>> demand for video conferencing, therefore we have no video-conferencing
>> system, and no clients who request video conferencing, etc.
>>
>> If anybody knows about these kinds of things I would be grateful for 
>> some
>> pointers or links.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> -Nate
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>
>
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