Video conferencing
Anne Wilson
cannewilson at tiscali.co.uk
Thu Feb 1 15:34:20 UTC 2007
On Thursday 01 February 2007 15:05, Frank Pineau wrote:
> When I travel on business, I like to set up video chat to talk to my
> family at home. The problem is, home is behind a NAT firewall (a PIX to
> be exact). I have limited IP addresses and cannot spare one to
> statically assign to an endpoint inside my network for this purpose.
> Regardless, I'd like to be able to connect to any node in my network,
> depending on who I want to call. I never know what I'm going to be
> behind, but it's usually also some sort of NAT firewall that I do not
> control. I've tried ekiga (nee Gnome Meeting), and a few others with
> almost no luck. I thought something like skype (which doesn't support
> video under linux) or an instant messenger that uses an intermediary
> server (Yahoo, ICQ, etc.) to get around the NAT issues but none of those
> support video either. I've tried VPN to my PIX, but as I can't control
> where I'm coming from, I haven't been able to configure a reliable VPN
> client for linux.
>
Much depends on your router. The NetGear that I bought recently does allow a
service to be made available to more than one end-point box. I believe that
it's what is called a 'stateful inspection firewall'. I've not tried it out,
so I don't know whether the initialisation would have to be from the home
box, though. Without that, it would be necessary to change port-forwarding
settings each time a new user was required - obviously not a good idea for
your situation.
aMSN is quite good in serving video, but there is no voice chat yet - it's in
the pipeline. You see the other person, but have to type your messages.
I've used it with a windows msn user at the other end, without any problems,
too.
> In short, when trying to video conference under linux, I'm successful
> around 5% of the time. It's almost always easier to boot into Windows
> and do it from there. What do you use for mobile video chat and how
> have you set it up?
I used to use GnomeMeeting with h.323 and that worked very well. I think
ekiga's move to sip, while good in the long run, introduces more
complications. Sadly, I don't have a friend using ekiga that I can test it
with, but I believe the people do get very good results.
Things are far from perfect, but improving all the time.
Anne
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20070201/9615fc30/attachment-0001.sig>
More information about the fedora-list
mailing list