[Ekiga-list] configuration

[John Hawley <johnhawley blueyonder co uk>]

I have joined this mailing list primarily to try and improve 
communication options for my profoundly deaf partner. Recent innovations 
in VoIP have offered potential for allowing the deaf to communicate 
freely with each other via the medium of web cam + lip-reading skills. 
Unfortunately, most of the VoIP applications have other priorities for 
web cam resolution and in a limited bandwidth scenario, the necessary 
frame rate for adequate lip-reading often suffers at the expense of 
overall picture quality. Ekiga would at least appear to give the user 
some control over these. Below is a post I sent to the Ubuntu forums 
(who re-directed me here) which I believe explains the gist of the problem.


> I have sucessfully installed Ekiga on one or two occasions on a number 
> of machines running both windows xp and Gutsy Gibbon However, I've 
> never managed to get a satisfactory video link operating and this is 
> crucial because the setup is intended to work for my partner, who is 
> profoundly deaf, to talk to her father who is in his late eighties and 
> partially blind!
>
> Thus what I require is for somehow to configure the available upload 
> bandwidth from her father's machine to give best possible video (best 
> in terms of frame rate to enable lip-reading) No bandwidth is required 
> for sound as it's of no value for the deaf!
>
> While at the other end, we require high quality sound ( because the 
> deaf articulate so poorly) and a "good" quality picture so that the 
> father can view full-screen but not necessarily a high frame rate.
>
> Matters are complicated by the fact that although the video camera at 
> one end (the father's) it supported by Linux, the embedded camera in 
> my partner's laptop is not. According to the internal documentation in 
> Ekiga, I should be able to configure how the available bandwidth (8meg 
> down and a measly 250K up) at both ends is utilised.
>
> The alternative is to continue to use Skype which on occasions is fine 
> but lately seems to favour high quality video at lower frame rate 
> rendering lip-reading extremely difficult.
>
> I've tried using the internal configurations but to date I've had no 
> success Does anybody please know how I can force such a configuration 
> on the system? (I've searched both this site and the Ekiga one with no 
> success) Hopefully someone *Knows* how to do it.
>
>
> Any suggestions would be warmly welcomed.

Regards JonnieH