Hi Myf, On Thu, 5 Nov 2009, Myf wrote:
> The main idea is to have *face-to-face conversation with people around > the world through video-conference*. Nice idea, but don't be surprised if you have a lot of problems due to poor connectivity. > Our first contact is actually *Makerere University*. A group of student > in the Business School are very excited to talk to their American > counterparts. However they seem to face technical difficulties as the > president of that student group had trouble with the facility. What are the actual technical difficulties? Skype being proprietary, closed source and using secret algorithms and being peer-to-peer can make it difficult to debug why a connection is not working. You can get technical call info from skype: Tools | Options | Advanced | Connection --> "Display technical call info ...."; then run your cursor over the active call window to bring up the technical info for your call. These sites may help: http://skypejournal.com/blog/2007/11/high_quality_video_whats_the_b.html http://myvoipspeed.visualware.com/ > I did a simple research of speedtest.net and found this ISP called > "Gilat Sitcom" who actually hosts the Mak websites and it has a > downloading speed up to 13Mbps, which is way better than the minimal > requirement for videoconferencing. As Mark Tinka pointed out, latency is particularly important for perception of quality (and general usability) in voice and video conferencing, and satellite latency tends to be much worse than terrestrial. If you wanted a dedicated link you could do it (I'm sure it wouldn't be the first or the only one in Makerere University) but you will have to find a significant budget to make it work and it won't scale. The best bet might be to talk to the network managers at Makerere and see if they can reserve or dedicate some bandwidth for your project (which will probably have a cost), or else only use the system at low usage times (e.g. 10pm at night). > as of open source concern. we are thinking about ssh tunneling of video > signals. Do you guys know if there's any already-developed products > around? Definitely not recommended, it will totally screw up your conference call to tunnel it over any TCP connection. If you need a VPN, use IPsec, but don't expect Skype to use it or work over it. Cheers, Chris. -- Aptivate | http://www.aptivate.org | Phone: +44 1223 760887 The Humanitarian Centre, Fenner's, Gresham Road, Cambridge CB1 2ES Aptivate is a not-for-profit company registered in England and Wales with company number 04980791. _______________________________________________ LUG mailing list [email protected] http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/lug %LUG is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/ The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way. ---------------------------------------
