[GnomeMeeting-list] Multicast/mbone with GM?

[Christian Strauf <strauf uni-muenster de>]

Hi there!

I was wondering what users of GM and developers think about Multicast Video
Conferencing- and mbone-support for gnomemeeting. I think that
multicasting/mbone is a very efficient way of video-/audio-conferencing.
A general overview about multicasting can be found here (RFC3170 -- actually
pretty easy to read):

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3170.txt?number=3170

The developers of GM are probably aware of the mbone-standards but for the rest
of the readers I quickly add some infos and links.

Communication via the mbone is done by using the Realtime Transport
Protocol(RTP). This protocol is described in an IETF-Internet-Draft:

http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-avt-rtp-new-11.txt

There is a rather complete collection of drafts concerning RTP and mbone here:

http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/ids.by.wg/avt.html1

One of the most comprehensive documents is the one on IETF's website about
Audio/Video Transport (AVT):

http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/avt-charter.html

It collects all information (Internet-Drafts and RFCs) that deal with
multicasting and RTP. This is probably the best starting point to get familiar
with the issue.

I think that gnomemeeting is one of the best, if not *the* best H.323-client I
know. Since there aren't a lot of free tools for doing mbone-conferencing
(except maybe for vic and rat which are both rather old and very uncomfortable
to use), I think that adding mbone-capabilities to gnomemeeting would fill up
the gap of easy to use and full-featured mbone-clients.

Just a thought. What do you think?

Christian

-- 
JOIN - IP Version 6 in the WiN  Christian Strauf
A DFN project                   Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universitaet Muenster
http://www.join.uni-muenster.de Zentrum fuer Informationsverarbeitung
Team: join uni-muenster de      Roentgenstrasse 9-13
Priv: strauf uni-muenster de    D-48149 Muenster / Germany
GPG-/PGP-Key-ID: 1DFAAA9A       Fon: +49 251 83 31639, Fax: +49 251 83 31653