Video conferencing recomendations

PhillJones · 04-10-2007, 10:17 AM

I've been looking around at videoconferencing options and have been surprised at how poor the choice is. I'm looking for multi-way video and audio. Application sharing and whiteboard would be cool if possible.

The only one of the free video chat programmes that does this is Yahoo, as far as I can tell but it doesn't have whiteboard or application sharing. Skype has the extra features but is only two-way, not multi-way for video. I was surprised to see that the multi-user video plugins for skype have all apparently died.

The professional solution I looked into, megameeting, use a flash web based interface and I even had a cool, if rather pushy demonstration of it. They wanted $1000 initial setup cost

I'm not aversed to paying for reflector bandwidth but I'm not putting that kind of money up-front, the system might be rubbish for all I know.

I looked into CU-seeme, which has gone from a multi-user video conferencing platform with whiteboard support to subscription based adult oriented video chat room that promises oodles of bored horny college chicks but in reality is 6 blokes waiting for something to happen.

Anybody use videoconferencing? What do you use?

Kimmo Jaskari · 04-10-2007, 01:30 PM

The "mega" in the name alone is a huge turnoff.

At work we have a Polycom based solution that works well. A big flatscreen in the conference room and a projector that connects together so when you have a conference you can share the projector as well as see each other. We have identical setups in the other offices, projector + video. Of course that is conference room to conference room but it's really impressive. Sound quality alone is superb, nothing like a scratchy phone line.

They have PC based stuff too, I think our Internal IT guy said something about a hundred euros per license (the PC based stuff can talk to the conference room gear too which is cool.) I haven't had a chance to use the PC based stuff much though, but the purpose-built hardware works really really well.

PhillJones · 04-10-2007, 01:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kimmo Jaskari

The "mega" in the name alone is a huge turnoff.

At work we have a Polycom based solution that works well. A big flatscreen in the conference room and a projector that connects together so when you have a conference you can share the projector as well as see each other. We have identical setups in the other offices, projector + video. Of course that is conference room to conference room but it's really impressive. Sound quality alone is superb, nothing like a scratchy phone line.

They have PC based stuff too, I think our Internal IT guy said something about a hundred euros per license (the PC based stuff can talk to the conference room gear too which is cool.) I haven't had a chance to use the PC based stuff much though, but the purpose-built hardware works really really well.

That sounds really impressive. I'm just looking for PC to PC stuff. Do you happen to know the name of the PC to PC software?

Kimmo Jaskari · 04-11-2007, 06:43 AM

Not sure, but check the polycom.com site, I know it's there. And they do offer a trial version, I think it's time limited to 10 minutes per call or some such.

As I said, I've just used the purpose-built hardware solution and that works really well and so I wanted to mention it.



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