Post 4.0 features and enhancements
With ConferenceXP 4.0 in beta, we're already looking at possible future enhancements and features. The following is a list we've collected from discussions with individual users, developers and workshop attendees as well as ideas from the development team. I'd appreciate hearing your opinions and priorities as well as your own ideas for enhancements.
- Telephony modem integration (bridge) to better enable inclusion of telephone conference calls into ConferenceXP sessions. Today, most folks are using the telelphony bridge capabilities of a Gentner but this is a relatively expense bridging solution if you're not already using one for echo cancellation / microphone aggregation. It's also a completely separate interface and frequently managed by a separate machine from the ConferenceXP node. Being able to use a simple analog modem (especially one of the cheap, plug and play USB modems on the market) to enable a ConferenceXP client to dial into a telephone conference and integrate that seamlessly into the session would be a very useful new capability.
- Wolfvision and ClearOne make some high resolution document cameras that could be integrated into ConferenceXP. Providing support for higher video resolutions with lower frame rates might be enough to enable this. Testing required...
- Localization: we've had several requests for localization of ConferenceXP from China and Japan. Anyone else?
- Digital (still) camera integration. MSR has previously demonstrated integrating support for USB-controlled digital still cameras into videoconferencing which is an interesting way to, for instance, share drawings on a white board. There are a number of cameras on the market today capable of taking 5 megapixel photos every few seconds that could be integrated in this fashion.
- UI to support local and remote control of pan/tilt/zoom cameras from within ConferenceXP. Possibly native support for the VISCA interface.
- For the venue service, integration with either Outlook or Exchange to provide integrated scheduling capabilities.
- Improvements to the venue service to enable quick venue status - think of the mouse pointer hovering over a venue to tell you who's active in the venue or what's currently scheduled for that venue.
- A new client toolbar to help manage video windows and audio during a session ("mute all", "re-arrange all", etc.). We've found that as people use ConferenceXP for ever larger numbers of participants, they've voiced a need for stronger client management capabilities.
- If you're following the hardware discussion section, you're already aware that ResearchChannel is working on real time high definition encoding. However, Bob Riddle with the University of Michigan Medical School suggested integrating support for DVTS streams into ConferenceXP.
- Security. Though I hesitate to open this tread here, as ConferenceXP deployments have increased, so have the requests for secure venues, authentication support, encryption support, etc. Instead of delving into any specifics, I'm more interested in hearing how high this is on your list of priorities relative to the other items listed here.
- Automatic (or manual) "slide catch up" that provides current presentations to late joiners (generically, "late joiner support").
What are your thoughts on these? What else would you like to see? What are you working on? What capabilities do you use in other RTC applications that would be cool to have in ConferenceXP?
We're listening...
All Replies
- Several people asked me about white board capture / digital camera integration. The paper that got me started thinking about this "Why Take Notes? Use the Whiteboard Capture System".
Hi Todd!Both ends are important, I guess. By this I mean that, as far as you can go into wide band development and enhancement, CXP should have also otimized posibilities for medium (near-low) bandwith as well. In our case, most students at Galileo University use not-so-fast laptop rigs, and most often, DSL home systems with an average of 32 Kbytes (256 kbps) speed.
Internet 2 is still viewed as a "clan" of high ended people, and it will certainly take a LONG journey before we see such type of connections available nation wide. Just selected universities among central and south america are "playing" with the new tech. ´specially with the Elane amd Elearning projects.
But we DO have an urgent need for a feasable system, capable of delivering "classroom experience" to many areas in our underdeveloped countries. So far we had a relative success using Microsoft's Producer system, but lacking interactivity it is limited in scope and application. We started experimenting with "ole" Netmeeting (I gues it is the father of newer CXP) but encountered many bottlenecks, mainly because development stopped without a chance for actual performance.
Another thing that would be certainly useful is a plain CXP "viewer", capable of working under W2K, as very many computers in our locallity are using such O.S. For our students, it is an ovious large spenditure to move into XP, just to be able to CXP their classes. Finally I still wonder why your staff does not get some voluntary helpers from the W2K community and rewrite some minor modifications to CXP and come up with C2K!!! As I understand, and my hacker students declare, it is just a minor problem with some firewall checkups which are preventing CXP to have an old fashion sibling, C2K...
Very urgently I recommend a more understandable CXP overview, with a complete guide for deployment and typical installation examples. Please realize, as you can se in the underatended forums, there are MANY questions unresolved, mainly regarding ways to overcome NAT induced problems, and clearly explaining how to configure the system so it becomes really possible to interconnect between subnets. Do not assume all potential users are Network Gurus, and also understand that most Network Managers (Webmasters) are reluctant to open ports, and love NAT hookups (I wonder why they want to map "everything" into a single IP, having hundreds available). It seems to be a general illness or "nightmare".
I'm still loking for answers to my, somehow clumsy, naive, but nevertheless stumbling questions...
Mike Aparicio. Medialab Director Galileo University Guatemala.
Net Meeting and ConferenceXP are not related in way, shape or form.
Your students are welcome to change the firewall checking code to get ConferenceXP running on Win2K. It just isn't a supported scenario for us.
JVE
Hi guys.
As I said to Jason on email, it would be great for our purposes if we could have the sound from a DV machine be one of the sound hardware choices. I am quite new to ConfXP, but it appears that the max compressed sound is 16bit/22KHz, correct? Could the codec compress at, say, 16/48?
Something else that could be good would be to implement some time of "automatic level control" for the microphone input. Maybe this has already been done?
Many thanks for a great program.
José
Hi Jose,
We only support 2 compression rates - 1 for 1 channel audio and 1 for 2 channel audio. With the audio codec we are using there were very limited choices that provided good quality and low latency.
Most people with big connections are sending uncompressed audio and it sounds great! 16bit, 11Khz is Mike Wellings choice and I defer to him on such issues. :-)
Regarding DV devices, our design for sending and receiving AV isn't flexible enough to handle them both coming down the same device stream right at the moment. It is something I tried to address but had trouble figuring out (I am human after all). It would be a nice feature though...
JVE
José,
It appears the OrangeWare driver for DV cams supports this: http://www.orangeware.com/endusers/webcamdv.html. Please let us know if this meets your needs and we'll add it to our release notes.
And here is an additional link that you may find informative:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/10/08/trash_that_webcam/index.html
- I believe that he would be very useful to have indicating of level of entrance of audio signal in the CXP client
- To extend layout available within the CXP: for example: screen capture display great and small screens of video
Yes, we've had several suggestions along those lines: better UI regarding audio control/quality/signal and support for streaming a single application in addition to the existing 'entire screen' capability.
Thanks.
- Hello.
thank you very much by the development of the CXP. it seems to me very interesting the improvements that you comment.
I think that it could be interesting that CXP in their new version supported the remote control of desktop. - another thing more
I believe that it would be very interesting that “Archive Service” had some type of authentication, of such form that only those allowed users could record the session It may seem a bit mundane, but I'd love to see the codebase evolve to reflect some great gains in the current Visual Studio (VS 9.0). Removing the local copies of interop assemblies, life for Office interaction would be one item.
The other is to use the Managed DirectX code. There's not much to be done about DirectShow.
Making the RTP layer based on Microsoft's Real Time Collaboration (RTC) work would be a big plus. That platform support is already on a lot of machines, and would provide much of the features that are coded here.
ConfXP does a great job with the RTP filter for DirectShow. The capabilities are also very important. Relegating some of the infrastructure support to other heavily supported platform components would make it easier to just focus on the core pieces that are in ConfXP.
