vat 4.0b2 review

Vat is an audio conferencing application developed by the Network Research Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 257K Developer: Steven McCanne

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Vat is an audio conferencing application developed by the Network Research Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Source code and pre-compiled binaries are available via anonymous ftp.

The LBNL audio tool, vat, is a real-time, multi-party, multimedia application for audio conferencing over the Internet. Vat is based on the Draft Internet Standard Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) developed by the IETF Audio/Video Transport working group. RTP is an application-level protocol implemented entirely within vat -- you need no special system enhancements to run RTP. Although vat can be run point-to-point using standard unicast IP addresses, it is primarily intended as a multiparty conferencing application. To make use of the conferencing capabilities, your system must support IP Multicast, and ideally, your network should be connected to the IP Multicast Backbone (MBone).

Vat provides only the audio part of a multimedia conference; video, whiteboard, and session control tools are implemented in separate applications. Our video tool is called vic and our whiteboard tool wb, UCL developed the session directory tool sdr Other related applications include ISI's Multimedia Conference Control, mmcc, the Xerox PARC Network Video tool, nv and the INRIA Video-conferencing System, ivs.

What's New in This Release:
Added code to Windows audio driver to convert to 8-bit linear if driver doesn't support 16-bit linear (the code in Win95 that's supposed to do this is apparently broken). Problem reported by dozens of SoundBlaster users.
Unicast sessions wouldn't work under Windows. (Re-)Incoporated fix from John Brezak that somehow got left out of b1 release.
Restored vat 3.4 "[net localport]" command (needed by ISI/MIT RSVP additions to vat). Requested by Steve Berson.
Fixed sitebox display bug on monochrome displays. Reported by Evi Nemeth.
Fixed bug where SS-10 could get stuck sending a continuous tone if the last byte before a completely silent frame was non-zero. Reported by Steve Deering.
Correct URL of SCO port on vat homepage. Fix from Shawn McMurdo.
Incorporated Irix5.3 and 6.x configure and config.h fixes from Andrew Cherenson.
Incorporated AIX configure and config.h fixes from Christian Zahl.