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 -- http://www.mpcontracting.co.uk Experts in Java development and website design

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