Last week Paul Warmbowski was completing a trial of the Vidyo personal telepresence server. He offered several VUC regulars a chance to connect for a test call. The experience was both welcome and very interesting.
The Vidyo client was a download that runs right in the browser. I must say that I was impressed. The video quality was good, but that was just a starting point. The client allowed for dynamic changing of the windows layout. It could be taken to full-screen mode or left as a window on the desktop. It supported desktop screen sharing on an application basis.
The Vidyo client found my Logitech 9000 webcam and Clear One Chat 160 USB audio device. When I plugged in the USB dongle for the Voyager Pro UC it let me select that audio device without leaving the conference.
My relatively modest two year old HP desktop seems happy enough to run the client full screen (1920×1080 pixels) without feeling overly burdened. The Vidyo client defaults to an automatic quality setting that trades off frame rate against spatial resolution. It seems like most of use were getting 854 x 480 pixels at 15 frames/sec.
Since my Logitech camera support 1280 x 720 pixels (720p) I tried to force the Vidyo client to use the camera in that mode. Only then did it seem to really tax the humble host desktop.
Vidyo has taken advantage of H.264 SVC…which means “Scalable Video Coding”…in offering their products. The principle underlying SVC is that you can create a video stream in layers, such that any particular end-point need only extract and decode those layers appropriate to its capabilities. It’s also supposed to address issue such as packet loss in the network.
I won’t go into the details of SVC right now, but here are some background links on H.264 SVC.
It was an interesting experiment. Thanks for putting it together Paul!