[X4U] Re: Video conferencing on a PC

[Steve Upton]

>
>Does anyone here have any recent experience doing video conferencing on
>a PC?

A bit, yes

>Some colleagues and I have been using iChat for meetings and are very
>happy with it (though we'd love to have an integrated whiteboard --
>having said that I just discovered that I can send drawings done in Ink
>through an iChat text message - not ideal for our needs, but it was a
>fun discovery!).

I've heard you can hook up other sources of video to iChat as well but that disables the live stuff of course.

You might also want to look into WebEx for just the preso part. It's pretty good for interactive preso stuff and you could probably sign up for an account for the duration of your project for not too much$$$. I would think it would work alongside iChat just fine.

>Anyway, we're now entering a situation where some of our clients want
>to do meetings "virtually" rather than traveling to meet in person.

right, we're there now as well.

>So, one thought we had was that we could buy a
>couple of refurbished powerbooks and use them as "loaners" for our
>clients -- set them up with iChat and maybe iStorm for whiteboarding (I
>haven't tested it yet), send them the powerbook and then have them send
>it back after their program with us is done (building in a small
>"rental" fee, of course). Who knows, it might even produce a few
>"switchers" along the way. ;-)

we did a test with a Mac Mini hooked up to an overhead projector and it worked really well. Along w/ the keyboard and the camera it still wasn't too expensive - no need for the display costs. People really dig the bluetooth keyboard and mouse as well as they are the only things on the meeting table.

Also we used the "Sightflex" which is a handy holder for the camera - sits right on top of the mini!

<http://www.dvforge.com/sightflex.shtml>

we also bought an adaptor ring for the iSight (overpriced from Kaidan) and a video camera wide angle lens to get more of our group in. Works OK... Apple should be smacked for not including threaded rings on the front of the iSight.

Now, as far as the PC is concerned, the AOL software does work but the times we've tried it we have been hampered by:

- AOL software also loads a bunch of that spyware crap that everyone hates but PC users get to lump daily
- configuration is not nearly as straight-forward as iChat
- PC hardware has to be all lined up. Classic stupidities like "my sounds card isn't working right" etc.
- performance, even on a fast PC, is not as good as iChat. They love what we send but what they send is fairly crappy. I think this is due to a couple of things: the iSight is very good - most PC cameras are fixed focus, low res, slow frame-rate, etc. Also I think the altivec part of G4 and G5 processors does the compression very well and very fast.
- if you do phone conf instead of iChat phone the performance might be better - I can't remember if you can shut audio off on iChat...

Good luck w/ it... I should let you know that I have converted at least one user to the Mac with the iSight/iChat solution alone.

Regards,

Steve Upton

________________________________________________________________________
o  Steve Upton              CHROMiX        www.chromix.com
o   (hueman)                               866.CHROMiX
o    upton at chromix.com                     206.985.6837
o
o  ColorThink   ColorValet   and now... ColorForums.com
________________________________________________________________________

--