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Hi All,

we have to attend a video conference and the organizer are equipped with the Cisco systems. Unfortunately the only video conferencing we’ve done is through Skype.

So, in order to join, we are told to have a H.323 or SIP compliant videoconferencing system (or software tool) which supports one of the following:

  • Audio codecs (G.711/G.722/G.729)
  • Video codecs (H.261/H.263/H.264)
  • accept calls from Internet or ISDN

From what I’ve found online, the free “software tool” include Ekiga, Linphone and Qutecom, which can all be installed on a Windows 7 client. Has anyone had any experiences with using these or other paid for (not too expensive) software to connect to Cisco video conferences?

Or any another solutions maybe?

Thanks alot,

Eddie

@Cisco

2 Spice ups
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Nice of the organizer to make it easy for others to attend…NOT!! I am not sure what would be compatible since most of the conferences I have attended supplied a client to enable you to access all content of the meeting. Ask them if there is a downloadable client that you can install before hunting down something you might not need.

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First see if they will provide you an extension and a video soft-phone from their system over the internet. If not, then issue you are faced with is actually two.

First the Cisco Video conferencing systems interact as if they are behind a PBX or as direct peer to peer devices.

In the PBX method, similar to dialing into an audio conference call, you need to dial in as well but support the video feed. That feed is supported either by a hardware device and SIP line or Softphone using SIP that supports your video codecs.

There is an assortment of software out there capable of doing this, however it typically requires you have a video capable SIP provider and then the necessary hardware device or soft-phone. Most are designed for peer-to-peer communications. CounterPath X-Lite is a free softphone package that you can upgrade to Bria (http://www.counterpath.com). You can consider providers like Globalinx as well which do provide video stream with a sip phone (hardware and software). Another method to get around the non-sense, is to build your own Asterisk PBX using PBX in a Flash (www.incrediblepbx.com), Elastix (www.elastix.com), and a few other options. You ultimately will open alot of doors for security concerns and financial expense which I think you desire to avoid, but it can give you volumes of crazy cool capabilities.

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just to come back and complete this post. . .

we tried out 2 possibilities and they both worked. The quality difference was minimal but both relied on the organizer having SIP enabled on their side.

  1. Use Counterpath X-lite or Bria 3 (better quality but cost money) with a SIP account with video capabilities. From our tests, sip2sip.info was the most stable.

  2. Easier option. Cisco launched a beta video conference client called Cisco Jabber Video for TelePresence, When installing this, it prompted us to register an account with jabber and everything was integrated. We could even do a Jabber to Jabber video conference without Cisco TelePresence for testing. Quality was good.

Cheers to Rockn and 31 Networks!

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The R-HUB HD video conferencing server at www.rhubcom.com is a cost-effective alternative.