Conferencing on the Internet
INTRODUCTION
This short tutorial provides explanations on how to join and/or create
conferencing sessions using the most commonly used conferencing tools.
It explains quick and most straightforward ways of doing it and those are
by no means the only ways of doing so.
The commonly used tools for conferencing over the MBONE (Multicast BackBONE)
are the following:
-
sdr (Session DiRectory tool, for controlling the
sessions). v2.3a1 is described here.
-
vic (VIdeo Conference tool, for video). v2.8
is described
-
vat (Visual Audio Tool, for audio). v4.0b2
is described.
-
wb (whiteboard tool). v1.59 described.
This tutorial assumes that you have them installed on your system and that
the directories where they are placed are in your search path. If you do
not have them, try the following links. (There are other conferencing tools
available on the Internet, like RAT (Robust Audio Tool) for audio, NV (Network
Video) and IVS for the video, to name a few).
It is also assumed that your operating system supports
multicast. If you would like to follow the MBONE conferencing events, your
site has to be connected to the rest of the MBONE either through normal
routing (if your service provider's router supports native multicast) either
through a tunnel. For more information about making these connections,
check out these links.