[Asterisk-video] Video Conferencing Solutions

[Nathan Baker]

Hi,

I was wondering what video conferencing solutions are actively being
developed and used today.  I have been reading as much as possible in the
past couple months, and haven't been able to find any solutions that are
stable enough to be used in production.  Here's what I've tried so far:

- app_conference

This is the only one I've been able to get more than two videos going on so
far.  It seems pretty basic, and as soon as I start using DTMF to switch
videos, it stops working right.  I usually end up getting distorted video,
which looks like it's trying to mix the video and show two people in one
stream (which I thought app_conference wouldn't do).  When everyone hangs up
after this happens, the module won't exit properly, and I have to manually
kill asterisk and start it up again.

- VMukti (1videoconference)

I started installing this, but it seems like overkill for what I need, and
it doesn't seem very mature.  I didn't really want to use a seperate Windows
Server with MSSQL, etc.

- Confiance VideoMixer

I wasn't ever able to get this compiled.  First off, the
confiance_videomixer-0.1.tar.gz download seems to be missing.  When I
finally tracked it down from an old mirror site, I couldn't get it to
properly recognize the ffmpeg libraries.  I gave up thinking I would try
Sergio García Murillo's Media Mixer

- Media Mixer (http://sip.fontventa.com)

This looked more promising at first, but I couldn't get it to compile
either.  First it was missing /usr/lib/libagg.a, and then is failed with:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lgsm
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [mcu] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/mcumediaserver/media'
make: *** [all] Error 2

To be honest, I'm very surprised at the lack of documentation and
activity for projects related to asterisk and video conferencing.  It seems
like there is a lot of potential, especially since the audio and video
quality of one-to-one calls are so good.  Are people actually using these
projects for more than testing, or is everyone using commercial solutions?
For my requirements, I would be very happy to find something that would just
take the first 4 callers, mix their video into a 2x2 array, and then send
that video back to all participants.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Nate
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