Tag Archives: video conferencing

XMeeting 0.4 preview 2: decent

The XMeeting project has been slow-going but fortunately release 0.3.4 from July 2007 has been very stable. Over the past year and a half, Apple released some Quicktime updates that caused a funny distortion of the local camera view. Otherwise, it’s been solid.

Near the beginning of the year, I found release 0.4 preview 1 posted on Sourceforge and tried it. Couldn’t keep it running. Preview 2 was released at the end of January and seems to be much more stable. It fixes the local camera view bug, has a cleaner Preferences panel and seems to have some updates for H.264. I’m still not connecting to the Polycom MGC-100 at any higher protocol and resolution than H.261 CIF, so that incompatibility has not been fixed. Still, I am pleased to see progress in the XMeeting program and a fix for the video bug.

XMeeting 0.4 preview 2

Greener IT through bicycling and VoIP

“It’s not easy being green.”

My blog, if you read it from the web page, is green. That’s entirely coincidental. Green happens to be a color I like; I’m not trying to make any particular statements with the color of my blog (except that PSU blue was getting a bit stale).

The focus of “green IT” is mostly on lowering the energy use and heat production of servers, through more efficient servers or a reduction in the amount of actual hardware. In the non-VoIP part of my group, we’re digging into a virtualization project that should reduce 50 pieces of server hardware down to about four if everything works out perfectly. Even a five-to-one reduction would be fine. I’m excited about this project for a number of reasons; one of them is that I won’t have to look at as much hardware in the server room. Fewer server problems should be diagnosed as hardware problems. And hardware problems won’t be so catastrophic–just use some VM magic to move a server from failing hardware to working hardware. This “greening” of IT first involves putting down a lot of green (money) before we see any environmental benefit, which will be secondary to all the system management benefits, the main reason we’re doing it all in the first place.

In a number of years, equipment rooms and power and cooling requirements will have shrunk but we’ll still be committing all kinds of environmental crimes through our still-growing IT staff: driving internal combustion engines at $10+/gallon of gasoline. Two losses of green there: the environment eats our exhaust and the gas stations eat our cash.

Several years ago, Penn State ITS bought a number of efficient departmental vehicles for the staff to use to travel around campus. These four-speed one-seaters are human-powered and the only emissions are from the driver. Sadly, the ITS bikes have been seen around campus turning to rust. Some have been reclaimed and are in active use; Telecom Building has one that gets regular use and I have heard rumor that 300 W College uses one now too. This program could use some fresh support. Biking around campus is pretty easy and you can take shortcuts; there’s no getting stuck in traffic or waiting for the shuttle.

I sit here writing a blog at 6 pm because I biked to work this morning, as I have done most mornings since early May. However, the weather (stormy at the moment) sometimes dictates my schedule. A worthwhile tradeoff, in my opinion: I’m saving money, getting into better shape, enjoying the outdoors, and not polluting. Several of my coworkers also ride to work. This is just one shade of a green IT department.

VoIP and close relative VCoIP (video conferencing over IP) come into play by allowing us to meet from wherever we may be. Phone calls are cheap, conference calling is easy, and video is available on every Mac laptop (and before long, on every laptop). Set up XMeeting on your Mac and participate in video conferencing, wherever you are. It even works through a VPN (somewhat lower quality but usable). Meeting face-to-face and handing out paper copies of documents is familiar and makes us feel like we’re doing business; the greener IT department can do the same thing using video conferencing with side content (whiteboards, Power Point, wikis, etc.). When the personal interaction is the main goal, Penn State’s videoconferencing services meet the need; for a meeting that needs a lot of electronic content delivery, Adobe Connect does a great job. We have the tools right at our fingertips.

Someday we’ll get the hang of telecommuting and people will be able to telecommute more easily. I know other organizations–non-edu, anyway–have already figured this out, but it’s still an awkward thing in higher ed. I heard an analyst say this at a VoIP conference last year, and she’s right. Telecommuting should not be a goal for a greener IT department, but we can all use the concepts and technologies that are part of the telecommuting method to be more environment-friendly and economical in our daily business.

How to set up XMeeting for use with Penn State’s videoconferencing systems

XMeeting, the Mac OS video conferencing software I previously reviewed here, works very well with Penn State’s mostly-Polycom video systems. Here’s how to set it up.

  1. Start by reviewing this H.323 video systems overview written by TNS’s video group.
  2. Open the XMeeting Preferences panel. We’ll go through the tabs from left to right.

    1. General: Enter your name or user ID. This will be sent to the video bridge or remote site and display under your image, so don’t enter something silly here. You might consider including the abbreviation of your campus or department.

      Automatically accept incoming calls if you want to do so.

    2. Appearance: Everything here is up to you.

    3. Accounts: Click the + under H.323 Gatekeeper Accounts to set up a new gatekeeper.

      Account name: gk.video.psu.edu or your choice

      Gatekeeper host: gk.video.psu.edu

      User alias/ID: You can enter any five-digit identifier that is not already in use on the gatekeeper. Room systems use their ISDN or conference phone number; I chose to use the last five digits of my desk phone number. This is the number that others will use to “dial” you for a videoconferencing session.

      Phone number: same as above (five digits)

      Password: leave blank

      OK.

    4. Locations: You can edit the Default Location or set up a new one. I just edited the default.

      First, a note. The H.323 protocol uses a lot of dynamic UDP ports and it can be really tricky to get it to work through a firewall or NAT. There are settings here for going through a NAT but don’t count on it working! Your best bet is to have your Mac on a public, non-firewalled IP address. Scary, I know.

      That said, let’s look at the sub-tabs for the Default Location.

      1. Network:

        Bandwidth limit: No limit

        NAT Traversal: Try different settings. I ended up choosing Use IP address translation and Automatically get external IP address. I believe this does help with NAT traversal by sending the external IP of the NAT in the H.323 headers, rather than the internal IP address.

        Firewall settings: I lowered the ranges to 30000-30010 and 5000-5099 so that I could open these ranges on the Mac firewall.

      2. H.323: Click the box next to Enable H.323. I cleared the boxes next to Enable H.245 Tunnel and Enable Fast Start. For Gatekeeper Account, choose the account you set up just a minute ago.

      3. SIP: Do not enable SIP.

      4. Audio: I used the default audio settings with uLaw as the first preference and ALaw as the second. Packet Time is also Default.

      5. Video: Click the box next to Enable Video. I set the frame rate to 30. You can lower this on a slow connection.

        The video codec selection is important. You may have to come in to this screen from time to time and change settings.

        H.264: works only with point-to-point XMeeting-to-XMeeting. It may work with other endpoints but doesn’t work with Polycoms (i.e. all of Penn State’s videoconference rooms).

        H.263: widely accepted. Looks pretty good. Works on all point-to-point calls I’ve tried, but does not work with the video bridge.

        H.261: the oldest and lowest-resolution codec, but most compatible. You have to select H.261 (and only H.261) when connecting to the video bridge (MCU).

        My normal selection is to just disable H.264 and then enable H.263 and H.261, in that order. When I connect to the bridge for a multipoint call, I disable H.263.

        I checked the box next to Enable H.264 Limited Mode.

      That’s it for the Locations tab.

    5. Audio: Choose your audio device from the list. It’s best to use a headset because otherwise you’ll get bad echo. If you get a USB or Bluetooth headset, once you’ve set it up you’ll have to select it from the dropdown lists.

      Uncheck Enable Silence Suppression and check Enable Echo Cancellation. These worked best for me.

    6. Video Input: Here you can choose which devices you’ll want to use for sending video. I have all three enabled. The Live Camera Module is normally what you’d use, but you can also send your desktop with the Screen Module or a static picture with the Still Image module.

    7. Address Book: Default settings.

  3. Hit Apply. XMeeting should register with the gatekeeper and display a green dot and the word Idle. You can press Command-I to get a status window verifying your registration and your directory (phone) number.

  4. Before you go on, if you’re using the Mac OS X firewall, go add the following two rules to the firewall for XMeeting to send/receive data and call setup information:

    H.323 call setup: TCP and UDP port 1720
    XMeeting data: TCP ports 30000-30010 and UDP ports 5000-5099

  5. Make a test call to the loopback: 39344. This will test two things: your audio/video (you should see and hear yourself) and your gatekeeper registration. If the call doesn’t complete by phone number, try dialing by IP address: 146.186.47.10. If that works, go back and check your gatekeeper settings and verify that XMeeting registered.

  6. Make a test call to the video bridge: 2222test. Remember that you will have to disable all video codecs except H.261 in order for video to work.

You can utilize the Apple Address Book to store the names and numbers of room systems or other desktop video users. A directory of Penn State’s public videoconference rooms is available here; click the link on each record and look for PSU Dial Number to see the directory number you should use to connect to the room.