Hi, I'm glad to see someone else working on this problem. I've been experimenting with a single box system for the last couple of months and found it to be usable for at least a half dozen cif vic windows, which has been typical for the sessions I've joined so far. just eyeballing it, it didn't seem to make much difference if i was running RAT encoding/decoding or not, or whether the video capture was in progress. but i'm sure there will be a limit on this and i'm particularly interested in improving the video quality as much as possible. this initial system was a Dell 933MHz P4 with a dual display AGP display adapter and a PCI video capture card; video in was a Sony camcorder and audio in was a PC mic. the main problem i ran into was echo issues for some remote sites. so now i'm experimenting with a polycom soundstation mic/spkr system instead. aside from room lighting issues, i think this system has been very acceptable to those who have used or seen it. display devices have been a video projector and a Sony Plasma screen. the plasma screen is great for ambient light levels and video, but not so great for text. as an experiment to fleshing out the system i set up a second system, an SGI O2, for running RAT encoding/decoding via the built-in sound processor, and for running a second camera into the built in video digitizer. this seems to work well, though there are idiosyncracies with the behavior of the SGI video and audio control panels (such as unintentional resetting to default parameters and in other cases not keeping the defaults). for the control console i'm using an X display panel (well, actually a Sun Ray but that's another story). the other immediate problem was having additional consoles for administering the windows screen off-view from the audience. i thought about getting a second lcd panel for the second windows display card, but now i'm inclined to try to make this work on a single lcd display for both the unix and windows systems. no matter how many unix systems i have i can easily connect them to a single display device via X. but combining the windows and X display is the problem. i could run an X server on the windows box to pick up the unix display as well, but i'd rather avoid yet another complex piece of software on windows. so i'm considering either switching the windows and unix inputs into a single lcd display; or, so i can see everything at once without hardware switching, running a vnc server on the unix box and a vnc client on the windows box so that the unix desktop shows up on the windows desktop. i'm inclined to go with this latter solution first. if anyone has any alternate suggestions/comments for simplifying this configuration, i'd be very happy to hear them. thanks, -gurcharan ===================== -gurcharan s khanna associate director research computing dartmouth college --- "Jay Beavers" wrote: Just thought I'd let you know that I'm now running an Access Grid node on a single ~$4500 computer (not counting displays, microphones, cameras) successfully. I've seen 35 QCIF & 3 CIF video streams work great spread across multiple monitors. Some details: * Hardware Dell Precision 330 Workstation (Pentium IV/1.4 GHz @ ~70% CPU utilization, 512 MB RAM w/ 155 MB in use) Primary display adapter NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Secondary display adapter Matrox G200 MMS Quad (four analog video outs) 2x Dell LCD panels @ 1600x1200 3x Compaq MP2800 Projectors @ 1024x768 Integrated full duplex audio on motherboard Integrated 100BaseT Ethernet on motherboard Osprey-200 Audio/Video capture card 3x free PCI slots (2x PCI, 1x AGP in use) El-cheapo microphone Sony S-Video camera * Software Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 1 & Windows Updates applied Osprey-200 drivers v1.52 Access Grid Virtual Venue 2000-1219 software Stock VIC v2.8ucl-1.1.3-win32 (necessary to enable send & receive on one machine, AG VIC has send disabled) Stock RAT v4.2.13 Multicast Beacon v0.63 * Changes from standard Access Grid 2000-1219 installation Added stock VIC & RAT to add video send & audio send/receive to one box Moved all services to one Windows 2000 computer Applied Internet Explorer MIME associations for AG components (previously sent to this list) Modified start-beacon.bat to use "jview ..." instead of "java ..." to work with MS VM native to Windows 2000 * Issues uncovered during testing Pre-Beta 2 Windows XP (next release of Windows 2000) incompatible with RAT send (RAT receives just fine) * Work moving forward Investigating interoperable, more efficient Windows client applications based on DirectShow and TAPI functionality included in Windows 2000 & Windows XP Investigating improving video quality & system efficiency using different codecs like MPEG-4, MSVideo, & MSAudio Investigating improved CPU efficiency with new Pentium-IV optimized codecs Investigating software echo cancellation (part of upcoming Windows XP release) Investigating fault tolerant multicast RTP video transport Future integration work pending discussions with AG team @ ANL FYI, I'll be out of office next week and not very responsive to questions about this setup while offsite. - jcb --- end of quote ---