[Asterisk-video] Videoswitch support for MeetMe

[Lorenzo Miniero]

Hi all,

since as far as I know only app_conference has video support for 
conferencing at the moment, and I thought it could be of interest for 
the ongoing work on the list, I attach here a patch that's supposed to 
add basic video support to MeetMe. It allows an user to send his video 
(no transcoding and no mixing, just forwarding) to all other users in 
the conference through a very basic console-based videoswitch mechanism. 
Just use the 'videoswitch' console command to choose which user will be 
the source of the video in the conference. Of course I know a console 
command to switch is not the greatest way to accomplish this, but I 
quickly added it only to show the switching actually works: adding some 
DTMF mechanism to achieve the same result shouldn't give too much 
problems. The patch modifies the trunk version of MeetMe, exactly 
version 49678 of the application 
(http://svn.digium.com/view/asterisk/trunk/apps/app_meetme.c?rev=49678&view=markup), 
but applying the same changes to any other version of MeetMe should work 
fine as well.

Even if the video features are really simple in the provided patch, I'm 
really interested in your opinion about it, and I'd really appreciate 
some feedback on how to enhance it. This videoswitching is the core upon 
which our work at University of Naples is currently based to add video 
support to our open-source implementation of the XCON (IETF's 
in-proposal standard  for Centralized Conferencing) framework, which is 
an modified version of MeetMe, enhanced with support for control 
protocols to manage conferences and floors. The mechanism we use to 
automatically switch video (instead of the console-based mechanism 
provided here as proof of concept) is just using one of these protocols, 
the Binary Floor Control Protocol (BFCP), which allows us to coordinate 
users' access to resources provided by the conferencing system, e.g. 
video in this case. At the moment we're also working on a remote video 
mixer/transcoder that will interact with the modified MeetMe through an 
ad-hoc protocol, and that will hopefully allow more users to send video 
frames at the same time, with a single mixed video to be sent back to 
all users in the conference (or more flows for the mixed video, if 
different codecs are being used by different users).
If you're interested in some more details, checkout our project page on 
Sourceforge (http://confiance.sf.net/), and feel absolutely free to 
contact me via mail.

Cheers,
Lorenzo

-- 
Lorenzo Miniero, Junior Researcher
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica
Università degli Studi di Napoli "Federico II"
Via Claudio 21 -- 80125 Napoli (Italy)
Phone: +390817683821 - Fax: +390817683816
Email: lminiero at gmail.com


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