vic 2.8 review

Vic is a video conferencing application developed by the Network Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in colla

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 590K Developer: Steven McCanne

0

Vic is a video conferencing application developed by the Network Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley. Source code and pre-compiled binaries acan be found on anonymous ftp.

The UCB/LBNL video tool, vic, is a real-time, multimedia application for video conferencing over the Internet. Vic was designed with a flexible and extensible architecture to support heterogeneous environments and configurations. For example, in high bandwidth settings, multi-megabit full-motion JPEG streams can be sourced using hardware assisted compression, while in low bandwidth environments like the Internet, aggressive low bit-rate coding can be carried out in software.

Vic 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 vic -- you need no special system enhancements to run RTP. Although vic 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). Vic also runs over RTIP, the experimental real-time networking protocols from U.C. Berkeley's Tenet group and over ATM using Fore's SPANS API.

Vic provides only the video portion of a multimedia conference; audio, whiteboard, and session control tools are implemented as separate applications. Our audio tool is called vat 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. Vic is backward compatible with RTPv1 and can interoperate with both nv (v3.3) and ivs (v3.3).

Here are some key features of "vic":
an ``Intra-H.261'' video encoder,
voice switched viewing windows,
multiple dithering algorithms,
interactive ``title generation'', and
routing of decoded video to external video ports.