Help me LJ Friends, Your my only hope!

[thorsbaby]

OK, not really but I have been thinking about Star Wars...

Does anyone have any suggestions on a professional Video Conferencing set-up?
I've found several options but I wonder if anyone has any personal impressions...

Comments

[chrystie69]

Depends on what you are looking for? Are you just looking for video conferencing hardware or are you looking for services for Video conferencing?

[sandhawke]

This has certainly been a question on my mind recently, as travel restrictions fall into place.

I've been playing around a lot with free-software/linux solutions; all I've really figured out is how to do a broadcast webcam with sufficiently low latency (which turns out to be quit hard) that you can use it at the same time as a phone-based teleconference. (Most broadcast webcams introduce at least 5 seconds delay, as they encode the stream, but that's completely unusable for a conversational setting.) If that's the kind of direction you want to go, let me know and we can get into details.

In my searching in this zero-cost space, some of the "vendors" I found were stickam, paltalk, and mebeam. I wasn't able to get any of them to work exactly right, but that could be my linux handicap. I saw some pointers to spontania, for what looks like a commercial service.

[thorsbaby]

We have had some success with openmeetings code from google.
http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/

There is a lag and I would hesitate to use it with a professional client but it works for our team-meetings where we have one video presenter and several audio audience.

[sandhawke]

Thanks for the pointer. I'll check it out...

Just to be clear -- as far as I can tell, openmeetings doesn't really have anything to do with google, beyond using google's "code.google.com" service to provide web-space for the project.

(Well, and the project leader participated in google's Summer of Code once.)