koz-n-fx (Score 1)

Anyone who has ever tried to get OpenMCU to work knows that it's alpha software. The problem with multipoint has nothing to do with bandwidth limitations or all the other ideas I read so far. When you shoot sound for a theatrical production, all sorts of effort is expended to make the quality as high as possible with no interference at all. That is completely different from videoconferencing. Each videoconference is conducted in a large echoing conference room with air conditioning noise and a single microphone in the middle of a bare table. Connect three of these rooms together and nobody can understand anything even with good echo cancellation. Four is out of the question. If anybody in the mix has a regional accent, the limit is two, not three. The methods of suppressing this all have their problems. Vocal Keying, for example, is usually awful because it clips words and sounds mechanical, etc. If you don't do something, each room gets the air conditioning and traffic noise of all the other locations. Echo cancellation only affects incoming echoes, not outgoing. So who is most likely to have multiple soundproofed conference rooms in diverse locations? Multi-million dollar corporations. Everybody else uses iChat. There are worse things than to have to go run down a nice Mac to have a conference. That's getting easier and easier. Commercial conference systems (Polycom, Tandburg, LifeSize), Mac xMeeting, and Windows NetMeeting all can speak to each other via H.323. We would give anything to have OpenMCU work... Koz