My travels for NAR are usually a day or two, and I’m back before I start to get missed. However, there are a few times a year (*cough* mid-year *cough* annual) where I’m gone for a week or so. With two young children at home, its a bit of a challenge not seeing them all week. So, what’s a good way to see people when on the road? Video conferencing to the rescue.
Strangely, this is one area of technology I haven’t ever really played with. On the advice of Mark, I decided to look at SIP based solutions since anything that follows the standard should interact with each other regardless of platform. Mark suggested ekiga for Windows and Linux. For OS X, a buddy of mine had pointed me at XMeeting.
Now that I had the software, I needed to create an account for my wife and myself at a SIP registrar. You can set up a free account at ekiga.net, and then you’re off to the conferencing races.
As to be expected, your results will vary with how fast your net connection at the time is. The video from home was a bit blocky, but you could tell who the people were and read their facial expressions. The limiting factor there is probably that I only have a 768kbit up channel from our cable provider. ekiga is originally on Linux, but the win32 port works great, so the homeside on my wife’s computer was set. XMeeting works well, but its echo cancellation could be much better. Its only at version 0.3.4, so hopefully that will improve with future releases.
Anyway, Daddy was seen by the kids, and all were happy. This is something I’ll be doing at every trip now that it works so well.
Have you found a multiparty solution that’s free (or close to it)? We’re looking for ways to do committee meetings. Webex is close, because it’s a fixed price for us, but it only (only?) handles six simultaneous video sources.