Just had a cry for help in setting up a teleconferencing system for a small group of FOSS developers. The proposed solution is to use a specialist service provider based on conventional telephony equipment - This works fine as long as it uses local rate calls, but I would need to dial a US number.. IRC would be my favoured choice, but it has been ruled out as some people have an aversion to the keyboard. This leaves voice-over-internet (VoIP ?), an area I have no experience of. Looking at www.linphone.org, it would appear that it would only support a one-to-one connection. On the other hand, it may provide a solution to the problem of long distance calls...
Question: Are there any compatable software packages that will run on linux and microsoft platforms ?
Regards, Paul.
On Saturday 13 December 2003 13:30, Paul wrote:
Just had a cry for help in setting up a teleconferencing system for a small group of FOSS developers. The proposed solution is to use a specialist service provider based on conventional telephony equipment - This works fine as long as it uses local rate calls, but I would need to dial a US number.. IRC would be my favoured choice, but it has been ruled out as some people have an aversion to the keyboard. This leaves voice-over-internet (VoIP ?), an area I have no experience of. Looking at www.linphone.org, it would appear that it would only support a one-to-one connection. On the other hand, it may provide a solution to the problem of long distance calls...
Question: Are there any compatable software packages that will run on linux and microsoft platforms ?
Regards, Paul.
How about http://www.webex.com?
Failing that, the JavaSound APIs would enable such a thing to be done quite readily. As you no doubt noted on Thursday there are one or two such programmers in this group.
-- GT
On Sat, 2003-12-13 at 14:24, Graham Trott wrote:
On Saturday 13 December 2003 13:30, Paul wrote:
Just had a cry for help in setting up a teleconferencing system for a small group of FOSS developers. The proposed solution is to use a specialist service provider based on conventional telephony equipment - This works fine as long as it uses local rate calls, but I would need to dial a US number.. IRC would be my favoured choice, but it has been ruled out as some people have an aversion to the keyboard. This leaves voice-over-internet (VoIP ?), an area I have no experience of. Looking at www.linphone.org, it would appear that it would only support a one-to-one connection. On the other hand, it may provide a solution to the problem of long distance calls...
Question: Are there any compatable software packages that will run on linux and microsoft platforms ?
Regards, Paul.
How about http://www.webex.com?
Failing that, the JavaSound APIs would enable such a thing to be done quite readily. As you no doubt noted on Thursday there are one or two such programmers in this group.
-- GT
I've never had cause to go near the JavaSound API, but it sounds like a challenge...
Matt
For some reason, just mentioning java makes me very nervous - 45Meg for the Sun tarball strikes me as way too much bloat for one tiny little need. I think the real challenge would be to implement something that does not require java.
Regards, Paul.
On Saturday 13 December 2003 11:16 pm, Matt Parker wrote:
Failing that, the JavaSound APIs would enable such a thing to be done quite readily.
I've never had cause to go near the JavaSound API, but it sounds like a challenge...
--
"To err is human...to really f*** things up requires the root password." From a collection of quotes at http://www.indigo.org/quotes.html
On Sunday 14 December 2003 01:40, Paul wrote:
For some reason, just mentioning java makes me very nervous - 45Meg for the Sun tarball strikes me as way too much bloat for one tiny little need. I think the real challenge would be to implement something that does not require java.
Regards, Paul.
The JDK is 33MB but you don't need that; the runtime is about 14MB (though for some unknown reason takes up over 100MB once installed - I have no idea why). However, options for running on both Linux and Windows are limited; Java is one solution and one for which the libraries are particularly comprehensive. In this case you need audio codecs, audio mixing, networking, a server for central registration (and perhaps mixing) and a GUI to hold it all together and keep the Windows users on board. That's not bloat; that's a pretty full feature set.
I don't know how many other cross-platform options there are for all that, let alone someone who knows how to bolt it all together. Having used JavaSound, networking and Swing I can say it's do-able. How about doing an outline specification then maybe some of us Java (or other) types could look at it in the odd spare moment?
-- GT
Hi Graham
I was not looking for a single cross platform solution, rather a selection of native programs that used a compatable protocol. Something along the lines of IRC but voice based rather than text. I don't know if such a thing is possible, but I'll try and have a look at gnome-meeting (now there's real bloat).
Regards, Paul.
On Sunday 14 December 2003 9:51 am, Graham Trott wrote:
I don't know how many other cross-platform options there are for all that, let alone someone who knows how to bolt it all together. Having used JavaSound, networking and Swing I can say it's do-able.
On 2003-12-13 13:30:32 +0000 Paul bdi-emc@ntlworld.com wrote:
This works fine as long as it uses local rate calls, but I would need to dial a US number..
http://www.ukfsn.org/cheapcalls.html may help you, depending on your current telco plan.
Question: Are there any compatable software packages that will run on linux and microsoft platforms ?
I think you have a choice between SIP (or is it RTP) type applications and H.323 ones. I think SpeakFreely was the easiest of the SIP ones and GnomeMeeting was the easiest H.323 one when I last looked. You can look at http://www.openh323.org/ for background, but I remember getting annoyed with the 404s and awkward software. I think I had working conversations with a few people. If you have more luck, please let us know how.
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Graham Trott -
Matt Parker -
MJ Ray -
Paul