vic

Vic, a video conferencing application, has been developed by the Network Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley. You can access its source code and pre-compiled binaries on anonymous ftp.

Designed to support heterogeneous environments and configurations, Vic is a real-time multimedia application for video conferencing over the Internet, based on the Draft Internet Standard Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), developed by the IETF Audio/Video Transport working group. With its flexible and extensible architecture, Vic can source multi-megabit full-motion JPEG streams in high bandwidth settings using hardware-assisted compression, while carrying out aggressive low bit-rate coding in software for low bandwidth environments like the internet.

Vic can be used point-to-point using standard unicast IP addresses, but it is primarily intended as a multiparty conferencing application so that you can make use of its conferencing capabilities. For this, your system must support IP Multicast, and your network should ideally be connected to the IP Multicast Backbone (MBone). Vic can also run over RTIP, the experimental real-time networking protocols from U.C. Berkeley's Tenet group and over ATM using Fore's SPANS API.

Vic provides the video portion of a multimedia conference only. Audio, whiteboard, and session control tools are implemented as separate applications. You can use vat for audio, wb for whiteboard, and sdr for the session directory. Other related applications include ISI's Multimedia Conference Control, mmcc, the Xerox PARC Network Video tool, nv, and the INRIA Video-conferencing System, ivs.

Furthermore, Vic is backwards compatible with RTPv1 and can interoperate with both nv (v3.3) and ivs (v3.3). Overall, Vic's extensibility, flexibility, and compatibility with other conferencing applications make it a promising software to consider for video conferencing needs.