[BNM] video conferencing

[A.J.Delaney at brighton.ac.uk]

Simon,
On Wed, 2008-10-01 at 09:33 +0200, Simon Early wrote:
> what with these super-speeds on t'interweb these days, are there any *really
> good* video conferencing systems out there that are not silly money?
> Apple claim theres is very good, so would it be worth buying 2 Macs,
> sticking one in the office and the other remote, or is there a better
> solution using deidcated hardware (again, not too expensive).?
It depends on whether you want video conferencing i.e. n people chatting
or simply two people having a video chat.  For the latter, Ekiga
(http://www.ekiga.org/) is a useful open-source, no-cost tool which runs
on Windows and Linux (not OS X currently).  This site
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/SIP+Video+Phones
has a useful list of SIP (an open-standard for VoIP) video phones.

If you were looking for n-way video conferencing at no cost I'd look at
creating a dedicated video stream for each conference participant using
http://www.flumotion.net/.  This would support very high quality but may
be overkill for your needs.

--
Aidan Delaney