Subject: Re: Reminder: Remote Participation Support for Admin Plenary Tonight

From: Simon Pietro Romano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 02:01:02 +0200

Dear all,

as a representative of the Meetecho team, let me jump into this discussion.

First, about the quality of the audio stream. Our system provides two 
different real-time (and when I say "real-time" I mean "real-time") 
streams: the former is a standard VoIP (Asterisk-based) GSM stream; the 
latter is an RTSP G.711 alaw stream. Both of them are not meant for 
high-quality transmission (which, as far as I know, is the objective of 
the classical IETF mp3 streaming based on icecast); they are rather 
meant to provide the participants with a good-enough audio experience. 
With respect to this, I defy anyone who tested Meetecho to demonstrate 
the contrary. The same holds for video, which is a standard H.263 
encoded (and mixed, if needed) stream with either a QCIF or a CIF 
resolution. We do not aim to do HD video or telepresence, or the like.
The point is that Meetecho has been conceived at the outset as a 
real-time collaboration framework; if you ever participated in a virtual 
meeting here at the IETF, you'll have noticed that we provide seamless, 
integrated access to the standard IETF jabber room, to live slide 
presentations (with automated trigger of slide changes on the chat), as 
well as (if needed) to both live video and audio. For this last part 
(access to the audio and video streams) we require people to execute a 
very simple and lightweight applet based on Java Media Framework which 
enables multimedia support. Those who don't want to use the applet  can 
just open they're favourite RTSP player and listen to the available 
audio stream; not to say that those who want to rely on the PSTN, can 
just dial-in through the PSTN bridge. As to the login credentials, the 
only thing we require is that participants insert they're preferred 
username, together with an e-mail address. We create on-the-fly a 
temporary account on our system, which is valid just for the duration of 
the conference and is immediately thereafter destroyed. We do not store 
any information about the users who logged into the system and we are 
not interested at all in using the information they provided for any 
other purpose.

We do believe that the experience we provide (especially to remote 
participants) is an advanced one and does not conflict at all with the 
services that the IETF normally offers to its participants. To have an 
idea of what I'm saying, please have a look at the recordings of the 
sessions we supported, with special regard to today's plenary, available 
at the following site: http://www.meetecho.com/ietf81/recordings. If you 
play it out, you'll also easily acknowledge the fact that the service we 
provide is useful both "during" the sessions and "after" the sessions 
(e.g. for the minutes, or as a reference for those who could not make it 
when the event was scheduled). You'll also recognize that the quality of 
the audio is definitely good. Correct me if I'm wrong.

We are anyhow open to criticisms, especially when they are made with a 
constructive aim.

Best regards,

Simon

> From: Gonzalo Camarillo <[email-masked]>
> To: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
> Reply-to: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Reminder: Remote Participation Support for Admin Plenary 
> Tonight
> X-RSN: 1/0/933/10396/57949
>
> Hi,
>
> > I don't know about the codecs, but there is a wireless hop. I'm getting
> > frequent very short drops as well as slightly buzzy sound and less 
> fidelity
> > than the parallel session streaming. The voices of people I know 
> well are
> > harder to recognise.
>
> one aspect to consider is that long play-out buffers increase the audio
> quality but also increase the delay. Many people have complained about
> not being able to effectively participate in the meetings remotely using
> the traditional audio streams because of the long delay. On the other
> hand, short play-out buffers reduce the delay but can also reduce the
> quality under bad network conditions.
>
> As you said, different situations require different services and having
> both services available makes sense.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gonzalo
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf 

-- 
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                     Simon Pietro Romano
               Universita' di Napoli Federico II
                  Computer Science Department
         Phone: +39 081 7683823 -- Fax: +39 081 7684219
                 e-mail: [email-masked]
           http://www.comics.unina.it/simonpietro.romano

     <<Molti mi dicono che lo scoraggiamento è l'alibi degli
    idioti. Ci rifletto un istante; e mi scoraggio>>. Magritte.
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