voip and video over private lan

I'm looking for advice about what software packages are available for
voice-and-video communications over a private lan. The thing about msn
and skype is they're good but they use the internet - you have to log in
to an external WAN serverand I wanted the same type of thing but
completely contained within my own LAN. Is there any software for this?
I'd also appreciate tips on hardware devices that might do the same
thing. I have a cisco router and I know about cisco voip phones but they
don't do video. Thanks for any pointers.

 

netmeeting?

 

The Asterisk software PBX handles video and voice and there are many
video phones and soft-video phones that work well with it. I've tried
the Grandstream GXV3000 and ATL400 video phones and X-lite (eyebeam)
and Ekiga soft-phones with it.

Having the PBX in-house means all the data stays in-house (on the same
LAN), although it's more than capable of being used to bridge multiple
sites together over the Internet.

If you don't want to build your own asterisk system, there
are many pre-built systems out there - eg. have a look at
http://www.drogon.net/dsx/ but I do have a vested interest in that
particular one!

Gordon

 

Cheers!

I started it more out of curiosity than anything else - I have a client
who runs/creates/manages wordpress blogs for his clients, so thought I'd
have a look at WP and see what all this blogging stuff was all about!

Half way down the page is an article on video phones. Been using
Grandstreams for a while now - relative in Orkney is about to have a baby,
so they have one, we have one and in-laws (her parents) will get one
as a present when baby is born - I've never been convinced about video
phones myself - the technology is there and workable, but ... Anyway,
I think the social/domestic environment is a good place for them though -
soon my in-laws will be able to see new grandchild 1000 miles away!

WP does seem quite versatile - my wife uses it now to record all her
travels and photos and so on...

Gordon

 

ah yes of course Mike, thanks very much.
why didn't I think of that?

 

ok Gordon thanks for your response.

 

'Cos it doesn't come with vista? and isn't supposed to run under vista
home either, apparently. AIUI there is a workaround though (flag the
entire nm install package as NT4 compatibility mode and then install).
I'm almost sure I saw something compatible called gnomemeeting, although
I assume this is only for linux.

Why is it that the h.323 design committee didn't seem to have a half
clue about firewalls?

 

That & SIP probably designed before NAT was popular... )-:

Gordon

 

Why do you say that?

 

VLC is a good playout tool that can also act as a server.
www.videolan.org

note it understands IP point to point and multicast.

some cisco phones do video conferencing - 7985?

but they are optimised around using a soft PBX for control - the cisco
version would be call manager on a server or the version that runs
under IOS on a router - a bit expensive for home use

 

Yes. Especially protocols like SIP show the problems with NAT. It bit me a
few times the last week in building SIP tests. It finally stopped when I
just used all SIP stuff on the same LAN.

IPv6 will need more firewalls. All the processing capacity now used for NAT
tables masquearding as 'firewall' can be used.

Koos

 

If your computers are windows system (not linux, unix,xBSD...), I
would like to suggest below solution:

Use miniSipServer as SIP server and use Xlite as clients. It is very
easy to establish VOIP environment in windows platform with them.

You can get miniSipServer from http://www.myvoipapp.com and get Xlite
from http://www.counterpath.com

good luck.

 

ok thanks for your response hongtian.

 

thanks for your response Stephen, I have VLC and I toook a look at it
but I'm confused as to how it does voice and video comms over LAN.

 

a lot depends what you mean by voice / video comms, but VLC is
bascially a "source to dest" flow.

if you need bi-directional (which voice sort of implies i suppose)
then maybe this is not the tool for you?

voice is just a sound track with 2 sets of flows - 1 each way....

VLC can act as a video sender from a video source or a file - for
example i have seen it sucking multiple channels from a digital TV
card and multicasting the stream (although the server guys who did it
mentioned it is much easier to make it do lots of channels in 1 box on
Linux).

so you need video in and hook it up to a PC interface that VLC
understands.