[Asterisk-Dev] Asterisk Hard Phone + Soft Video Client Integration

[North Antara]

Harry Yeh wrote:

> I was wondering if it is possible to develop a soft video client that 
> can be integrated with a Hard Phone so that you can use your PC to 
> display video when talking on a hard IP Phone. So essentially, when 
> you pick up your hard phone and dial, if the other side supports 
> video, you would automatically start sending video and vice versa.
>
> A product on the market that does something similar is the Cisco VT 
> Advantage. If anyone has any plans to develop any thing like this or 
> wants to see how we could get started, please send me an email. I 
> think this would really bring desktop video conferencing to business 
> users since and to the mass market since won’t have to buy a phone 
> that specifically supports only video. With the mass of webcams out 
> there already I am sure that if this was made with asterisk that low 
> cost desktop video conferencing will become even stronger.
>
> Harry
>
I'll add a little bit more here.

Harry and I were talking on IRC earlier about this. Basically, the way 
Cisco does it, is (as far as I understand it) essentially, the IP phone 
would register to the VT Advantage software that is running on a PC 
which is connected to the LAN port of said IP phone. The VT Advantage 
software combines the audio from the IP phone with the video from 
itself, and sends them off to Call Manager, or whereever. This is an 
easy way to go about it, but that would mean you'd need a "proprietary" 
video client or something.

We talked about how * might be able to handle this. I don't reall know 
how the channels work, so I may be way off base here. As far as I 
understand it, code would really only need to be done in RTP (and 
perhaps IAX2 if we want support there) or something. I envisioned adding 
an option or two to say sip.conf, like videopartner=someotherpeer, then 
you would have peers like [bob] and [someotherpeer] which would be the 
IP phone, and another IP phone (likely a softphone) that supports video, 
respectively.

If * were able to check for the videopartner (or whatever it's named) 
flag, it would receive the call from peer bob, and say "okay, you've got 
this flag set, so we should call someotherpeer, send the video (and 
perhaps empty audio) there, and send bob the audio.". It would also of 
course do the reverse, and accept video from someotherpeer and audio 
from bob, and combine them, and send them off to joe (who is a remote * 
box, or IP phone, or whatever)

There are some obvious issues with doing this. The only one I can really 
think of now, is you'll very likely not have synced audio/video (unless 
you've got a really good connection, I guess). Other questions need to 
be raised also - such as, what happens if bob dies, but someotherpeer is 
still around (or the opposite). Should the call end if one of clients 
goes away? Maybe...


Anyhow, I think this is a great idea, and wouldn't really break any 
channel specs/RFCs as far as I know. * would basically just bridge three 
(or more) channels together, and combine/split the audio/video from/to 
two of them.


Does anybody have any input on the feasibility/difficulty of something 
like this? Any obvious reasons it would simply not work?


-North Antara