Me And My Macbook

Videoconferencing isn’t something that we take advantage of as often as I would like. But the facilities available to us get better and better every day. When SURFnet started offering Macromedia Breeze (now Adobe Connect) about a year ago it meant that we gained access to virtual meeting rooms.

Roomsystems
There always has been this division between the desktop videoconferencing systems that use webcams and relatively small video screens and the roomsystems from companies like Tanberg and Polycom. Adobe Connect aims at the webcam scenario, Click to Meet has support for both desktop systems and roomsystems.

Big disadvantage of Click to Meet is, I think, that it requires Windows and Internet Explorer. You can’t use the client in combination with Firefox and you can’t use it on a Macbook or on Linux.
But luckily for Mac users there is an alternative to using the Click to Meet client: XMeeting.

Both the Polycom (we have a VSX7000) and Click to Meet use the H.323 protocol to communicate, and the freely available XMeeting has support for both SIP and H.323 build in.

Advantage of the way the conferencing infrastructure is setup at Fontys is that you can use a phone number to ‘ call’ the Polycom, but every conference room that you create in Click to Meet automatically also gets assigned a phone number. So in XMeeting I would just enter the number of the room to get access to it. Although that does mean you have to be registered to a gatekeeper that is connected to the SURFnet network. I used the Freelove gateway at 192.87.102.230 for XMeeting.
A huge problem when doing this from home behind NAT is getting the port forwarding setup though.

XMeeting isn’t limited to just showing the video from the iSight. You can also select to show your desktop instead. Useful if you’re trying to explain someone how an application works.

Presentation Sharing
You can show your applications on the Macbook to the other participants by selecting a different input. Because we’ve got the optional People and Content module, the Polycom can also transmit the screen of an attached laptop as video to the other participants.
If you plan on using th application sharing option in Click to Meet you’ll have to remember that only other CTM users will be able to see it. The Polycom and XMeeting won’t be able to show it in that case.

Conclusions
Nice to see a Polycom + CTM + XMeeting/Macbook connected. Systems from different worlds working together.
Not nice to see that at home NAT + H323 forces you to forward a number of ports just to make it work.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Software, hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.