From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Dec 17 1999 - 16:43:00 MST
On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Gina Miller writes:
> > Can someone suggest a FREE video conferencing software url, that I can
> > dowload for use with a philips pc camera? I am running on Windows 98. I
>
> You're running the wrong operating system. Move to an OpenSource OS,
> and solve your "looking for free but legal warez" permanently.
>
> There is no noticeable OpenSource community for MS OSses.
>
Eugene, while in principle, I could not agree with your comments
*more*, I am inclined to disagree in practice.
I've been trying to videoconference for perhaps 5 years
and the questions Gina asks are application specific and
should not be tossed off onto an OS/politics debate.
The bottom line, from my perspective is that there are perhaps
3 videoconferencing "nodes": CuSeeMe, Microsoft NetMeeting
and Intel's videoconferencing. There is a common ground
between these three which I believe is a standard called H 321 or
something similar.
Intel's perspective was determined by physical boards designed
to videoconference over dedicated ISDN lines. CuSeeMe's perspective
went from entirely academic to pseudo-commercial when I think it
got co-opted by White Pine. Microsoft has a valid entry with
Net Meeting, the problem is that there are a limited number of
host servers and your performance may vary.
I do no know where these stand vis-a-vis Linux. I will state for the
record, that Linux is probably a year or more behind state-of-the-art
with regard to complementary hardware/software solutions. I will
also state that from my brief impression of installing Linux and
examining some of the code that *CURRENTLY*, LINUX and Microsoft
offerings are of about equal quality.
Microsoft has the advantage of having (in theory) highly trained
professionals working on the development (with the nemesis of closed
source). Linux has the advantage of open source but suffers in various
areas from a lack of "professional" developers. From my perspective of
many many years in the software industry, these net out about equal.
If you are trying to video-conference over the net, for now I would
go with Microsoft Netmeeting, with CuSeeMe (the non-open-source
version) as a backup. I do not know of any "free" package that is
up to state-of-the-technology with regard to video-conferencing.
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:06:06 MST