Tech Forum

Our Stake presidency has the desire to hold some training meetings via interactive video conferencing. This would mean multiple video/audio streams (one per building) so everyone can speak with each other and see each other. I've looked into this and decent camera's are not too terribly expensive it's just the monthly fees for the services I've found to do this are undesirable. The best I've found so far is oovoo.com at $18 per month for up to 6 video streams which would suit us given we have 6 buildings. The free ones like Windows messenger and Skype only seem to support 2 connections and audio/video streams.

Does anyone know of a free solution to this? Has anyone heard if the Church has considered providing this on their servers? It obviously requires a server and server software app to aggregate and redistribute the feeds to everyone so it takes some doing but would be very useful in our opinion.

russp wrote:Our Stake presidency has the desire to hold some training meetings via interactive video conferencing. This would mean multiple video/audio streams (one per building) so everyone can speak with each other and see each other. I've looked into this and decent camera's are not too terribly expensive it's just the monthly fees for the services I've found to do this are undesirable. The best I've found so far is oovoo.com at $18 per month for up to 6 video streams which would suit us given we have 6 buildings. The free ones like Windows messenger and Skype only seem to support 2 connections and audio/video streams.

Does anyone know of a free solution to this? Has anyone heard if the Church has considered providing this on their servers? It obviously requires a server and server software app to aggregate and redistribute the feeds to everyone so it takes some doing but would be very useful in our opinion.

This could be helpful: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/LDS ... nferencing

And so could this: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/LDS ... ocal_Units

And this is another interesting one: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Per ... pilot_test

Good articles. I notice the first one mentions Oovoo.com which is the cheapest I had found so far. I guess I'll look further into Oovoo to see if you have to maintain a subscription or can just pay when needed or what.

You can display video using Skype going both ways. The local PAF users group here in Utah Valley did a presentation, we were even able to ask questions of each other and get answers using a PC to PC connection. Using another software item, we were able to display both screens on the same screen for viewing by the nearly 100 people at the meeting, and he was able to see us too.

We projected both onto a large screen. Everybody was impressed with how this was able to work and the group's executive committee is planning to do this when the presenter can't come to the meeting but could do his/her presentation by computer.

JamesAnderson wrote:You can display video using Skype going both ways. The local PAF users group here in Utah Valley did a presentation, we were even able to ask questions of each other and get answers using a PC to PC connection. Using another software item, we were able to display both screens on the same screen for viewing by the nearly 100 people at the meeting, and he was able to see us too.

We projected both onto a large screen. Everybody was impressed with how this was able to work and the group's executive committee is planning to do this when the presenter can't come to the meeting but could do his/her presentation by computer.

Skype, MS messenger, yahoo messenger, etc... all support two-way video. The trick is when you get more than two video feeds going. The problem is that if you have to send, for example, your own video/audio feed to more than 2 people at once you will quickly run out of upstream bandwidth. Hence, you need another third party to aggregate all the individual feeds from the various parties into one downstream feed and then send it to each party. That way, each location only needs to support one upstream connection and one downstream connection. This is a quicky and dirty explanation and the "whys" involve a little more detail in how TCP/IP works but suffice it to say that for more than 2 video feeds (ie: point to point) you need to get a server involved which for now means a paid service.

We are conducting a pilot of a product we hope to release that we think would meet your needs. However, it will be a while before we can make it available. If the current product testing works out, it will not quite be free, but will offer more flexibility and capability than the free services. We do not have dates for when it might become available as we are not yet certain we have the correct product selected.

The posts such as this one help us drive the need for such a solution.
Shanna

sgerrard wrote:We are conducting a pilot of a product we hope to release that we think would meet your needs. However, it will be a while before we can make it available. If the current product testing works out, it will not quite be free, but will offer more flexibility and capability than the free services. We do not have dates for when it might become available as we are not yet certain we have the correct product selected.

The posts such as this one help us drive the need for such a solution.
Shanna

I wonder if you are referring to the third link I gave in my earlier post:

https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Per ... pilot_test