Fwd: Class via H.323 (fwd)

Rick Stevens stevens at mcs.anl.gov
Tue Jan 11 12:21:56 CST 2000



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:41:28 -0600
From: Robert Olson <olson at mcs.anl.gov>
To: fl-core at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: Fwd: Class via H.323


>X-Sender: amiot at daisy.re.anl.gov
>X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Pro Version 2.2 (32)
>Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 22:33:17 -0600
>To: cic-cio at cic.net, cic_video at anl.gov
>From: Larry Amiot <amiot at anl.gov>
>Subject: Class via H.323
>Cc: rdixon at stargate.uts.ohio-state.edu, nosh at uiuc.edu
>
>A historic event occurred this evening. The first class was taught using
>H.323 technology on the CIC purchased Multipoint Control Units located at
>OSU. A graduate seminar -spearheaded by Nosh Contractor of the UIUC- on
>"Communication Technologies and New Forms of Organizing" (the class has a
>slightly different name at different universities) was co-taught by the
>University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Illinois at
>Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Southern California at Los Angeles.
>A class at Purdue University also participated.
>
>The class lasted from 4:00pm to 7:00pm CST. Each of the four sites used
>Polycom H.323 stations. I set up the MCU's located at OSU remotely from my
>Argonne site, and I passively monitored the conference using both Zydacron
>(I used this station to record the class) and VCON H.323 stations. A seventh
>station was set up at UIUC where the class was broadcast using RealVideo
>technology. The communication was entirely over the Internet with
>conferences using 384Kbps encoding (768Kbps full duplex). That required the
>OSU site to support eight times 768Kbps of bandwidth).
>
> From a technical viewpoint, the technology worked well with only a couple of
>minor problems. One site had poor quality audio (I think that was a local
>microphone pickup problem), and we had the MCU crash once which required me
>to restart it remotely. The other sites had good audio quality, and the
>quality of the video was very good at all sites. The voice switching
>capability of the MCU seemed to work well in the multiple classroom
>environment. All sites are now learning how to best control their cameras
>and microphones.
>
>We plan to archive the RealVideo recorded at UIUC, and I recorded the entire
>class on VHS tape. I plan to have it encoded in MPEG1 and made available on
>the VideoCharger located at Argonne. The class will continue on Monday
>evenings in to the beginning of May. Since the UIUC classes have not
>actually started yet, only Nosh Contractor appeared at the UIUC site. Thus,
>the archived video will be important for his class to catch up with what
>happened in this first class.....Larry
>
>*****************************************
>Larry Amiot                             *
>Visiting Senior Research Scientist      *
>Committee on Institutional Cooperation  *
>With an office at                       *
>Argonne National Laboratory             *
>9700 South Cass Avenue                  *
>Argonne, Illinois   60439               *
>amiot at anl.gov                           *
>630 252 5432                            *
>*****************************************





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