I, im currently evaluating video conference solutions and im pretty much disappointed. im running freepbx (in a flash / asterisk / switchvox ) in several business locations and would like to go on the next step. i have the vision of a video-extension powered by asterisk and mysql:
my idea is:
conference rooms are already available in freepbx, so as soon as people arrive in the room, asterisk knows of them. a script could update a mysql-table, (userid, IP, etc). all we need now is a flash gui to display webcams streamed from that ip. is that so difficult?
these would be just a beginnig etc
What type of video conference do you envision? Most MCS’s (multimedia conference servers) such as RadVision use a “Hollywood Squares” style presentation where the user with the floor is in the center window with the participants around the center window.
Video Mixing is far more demanding on bandwidth and CPU than voice.
There are several open source MCS projects, none of which work very well.
Asterisk could handle the call control and then hand the call off to the MCS. This in itself would be a significant work effort.
Asterisk must support the feature before FreePBX can integrate it. Since SIP VC is just gaining traction and H.323 support is limited in Asterisk I doubt the project would move in that direction.
Additionally most MCS’s also allow legacy ISDN H.320 and ATM H.321 endpoints to participate in the conference.
Asterisk can setup a point to point SIP video call in pass through mode today.
This would be great. I have a customer who is asking for this now. They are a non profit and are asking me to look into the MS product since its much cheaper for them. I looked at VMukti but you need the full blown SQL for Windows.
ok, there is a opensource project out there, called bigbluebutton. its a conference system which utilize asterisk to make calls via asterisk-java bridge.
why not just going the other way around? leave all calling-related stuff to asterisk, but as soon u create a new unique conference-room-number in the mysql db. then use a streaming server eg: red5 to connect to it. red has something called rooms/ scope so whoever knows the url / room number (unique asterisk-conf number) u can join. so what u need is (to my knowledge is):
red-server (opensource)
flex / flash gui (for the user webcams to stream up / downstream)
How do you install bigbluebutton into pre-existing freepbx or the other way around, install freepbx into bigbluebutton. When you install bigbluebutton, it also install asterisk. From the reading I did installing freepbx it updates asterisk files or overwrites them. Has anyone successfully done this and how?
I looked at a combined system and I know some have them running, but… bigbluebutton has some fairly high system requirements by itself. I usually don’t build my test systems on on much more than a P4 w/1GB of RAM and BBB chokes that out. That said I built one the authors intended it - on a 4way Xeon 3GHZ and it performed quite well. This was on an Apple xServe and built as a VM system using Parallels server. Conferences work in VM in this instance as well.
At the end of the day, my approach has been in keeping a BBB system as a standalone. That and I found installing BBB on Ubuntu worked for me, as opposed to CentOS( It can probably be done, just not by me.) Infact, after failing while trying to use (too low of power) VPS systems I settled on the lowest cost BBB from http://genericconf.com/ which ran at 25% of the monthly cost any other VPS offering that had the horsepower to run it. $9.95mo. vs $35 plus.
Now, I am going to see how I can connect my local system to this. I am not sure I can.