[asterisk-users] Is anyone using * for 2 way video conferencing?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Robert Augustyn wrote:

> Hi,
> One of my clients, wants to use * box to run weekly meetings between remote
> locations over the internet.
> What would be the best configuration for this? We are talking about two
> conference rooms.
> I am referring to the actual hardware/software and bandwidth requirements
> for this to work well.
> I have run two software video phones and I had marginal results with it when
> displayed on large LCDs, delay and blockines ware the problems I have run
> into ...

I've been "playing" with video phones over the past month or 2.

You've got 3 choices: Bottom-end is Xlite, etc. soft-phones.

Desktop videophones - currently Grandtream GXV3000 and ATL4000's.

Top of the range Polycom video conferencing units.

Starting with the top-of the range ones - these "just work" Don't even 
need an Asterisk box. Expensive though - I did one help setup a pair of 
these, one in the UK, the other west-coast US. Both with 42" plasma 
screens. Very nice, worked very well. Very expensive.

More recently I've been using Grandstream GXV 3000's. For the price; 
Fantastic. They do have audio and video outputs too - I have connected one 
up to my 32" flat-screen TV and it worked satisfactorily.

Picture quality is as good as the bandwidth you allow it to use and they 
can go from 1 to 30 frames per second. It uses about 128Kb/sec by default, 
but you can crank it up to 2 or 3 times that. The Polycoms I think were 
using about 225Kb/sec.

I've used the Grandstreamw with XLite - XLite using the same codec, so 
same screen picture size. More or less just worked when I got the codecs 
to match.


So the big issue is the Internet - you're using a lot more bandwidth, so 
need a better link. I found with the Polycoms that the VPN we were using 
was introducing a lot of Jitter to the link which degraded picture quality 
- turned off encryption and it was fine (cheap Draytek routers doing 
encryption in software)

Right now, I'm using them in a more "domestic" setting than business - I 
know more about the Internet in hte UK, so all sites I'm experimenting 
with have good ADSL conections and 3 of us are on the same ISP, so 
minimising traffic over the public Internet.

So there you go - hope this helps!

Gordon