Here’s an admission of sorts. I quite admire Dave Michels' friend Colin Berkshire. He’s a consistent source of both wit and wisdom. For example, today he describes his somewhat unusual use of a Grandstream GXP2160 IP Telephone in My Line-less…
A reader posed a question the other day. He asks;
I have a question for a friend. He has a smallish meeting room capable of accommodating 8 people. The problem is that some of the walls are made of glass.
When doing conference calls, the echo from his room is impossible to handle which leads to a crappy experience for others.
Which room microphone/speaker should he purchase? Ideally, it needs to be able to connect to a laptop that is brought into the room for meetings.
This is sort of question that I enjoy, so I thought it worth sharing my response.
If my first approach was too much for my desktop, then perhaps I could split the workload between my desktop and my laptop. This presents a different set of problems, but ultimately makes the process more robust.
In this arrangement my laptop joins the JVB session. It’s running VoiceMeeter, Chrome & Bria. It provides the audio mix-minus feeds.
InfoComm 2015 is next week, which has swayed the nature of press releases filling my in-box. While most are less than interesting, there was one from Phoenix Audio Technologies that piqued my interest. They have introduced an intriguing new device they call the Condor. Condor is not a typical SIP end-point.
Condor is an audio pickup appliance, essentially a microphone array with some sophisticated on-board DSP capability. With an on-board SIP client it’s one component of a huddle room conferencing solution. Add a large HDTV with built-in speakers and you have a complete solution for audio conferencing. You’re also well on your way to video conferencing.
I love when things “just work.” This happens so rarely as to be noteworthy. What follows is a nice example with respect to my Polycom VVX-600 and a USB-attached headset.
This afternoon a plaintive beep in my ear told me that the battery on my Sennheiser DW Pro2 cordless DECT headset was nearly depleted. This when I still had a lot of my working day left. Looking across the room I saw a wired headset that I have been evaluating for some ZipDX applications. It was a Passport 21P Headset
In the production of over 530 VUC sessions we’ve undertaken some odd and occasionally rather complicated arrangements. Quite possibly the most complex is when we interconnect the WebRTC-based Jitsi Video Bridge with YouTube Live and the ZipDX conference bridge. I set about described aspects of this process a year ago, but stopped short of describing how the entire arrangement worked. Well, worked most of the time. This article will bring you current with my various attempts to make this process robust and repeatable.
Preface: When we use Jitsi Video Bridge we lose a couple of the conveniences that come with a Hangout-On-Air. Where a Hangout-On-Air has an automatic link to a YouTube Live event, we must do this manually when we use JVB.