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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Just a note to let people know that we’ve made
substantial progress at Microsoft Research working on our conferencing
components.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>We’ve been writing an RTP network stack for the DotNet
Framework and integrating it with our Windows Media and DirectShow
technologies. Our current target is enabling 5-way high quality conferencing
for use in researching futures of distance education.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>We’ve reach the point where we put on a pretty good
demo. We’re doing 320x240 video conferencing with 15 delivered &
rendered frames per second using MSVideo compression. MSVideo is a
proprietary offshoot of MPEG-4 research which has been highly optimized for the
Windows OS and MMX/MMX2 enabled CPUs (Intel Pentium III, IV, and Athlon XP).
We’re getting almost no compression artifacts at sustained 15 fps using
only 512 kb/s per video stream (256k stream, double sent for loss correction).
We’re also using MSAudio to get high quality audio streams at low bitrates
(~128 kb/s after error correction). Our goal is to enable $1500 desktops
to participate in two way conferencing over a 1.5 Mb/s network and five way
conferencing over a 10 Mb/s network. We also leverage larger hardware to
enable AG-like scenarios of dozens of participants, though we haven’t
done performance and scalability testing to know where our limitations are
currently.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>We’re also working in a componentized fashion to
enable other real-time network application to use the RTP stack. For
instance, we’ve written some network diagnostic tools and we have other
groups creating distributed whiteboard / workspace applications on top of the
RTP stack.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>We’re currently at demo quality, but not distribution
quality. We have a number of additional features that need to be
implemented to enable support of multiple types of cameras and device
configurations as well as performance and security work before we can
distribute externally. I’ll keep everyone posted as things
progress. Our intention is to post binaries on Research.Microsoft.Com for
research and educational use in the next few months.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>We’re demonstrating the system in conjunction with </span></font><font
size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>University</span></font><font
size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> of </span></font><font
size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Washington</span></font><font
size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>, Carnegie
Mellon, and </span></font><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Brown</span></font><font size=2 face=Arial><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span></font><font size=2
face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>University</span></font><font
size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> at the
upcoming Next Generation Internet Principle Investigator’s conference
this weekend.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> - jcb</span></font></p>
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