Videoconferencing rundown.

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

Hey, all.  As promised, here's my rundown.  I apologize for its being somewhat
incomplete; I hadn't considered actually doing a write-up until I e-mailed you
guys, and a fair bit of research had already transpired.  Anyway, enough
weaseling.

The state of videoconferencing solutions for OSS is pretty sorry.  The
landscape is littered with dead, moribund and/or incomplete solutions.  Much of
what's left is poorly documented and difficult to set up.  I completely failed
to find a recent review/comparison of server-side ("MCU" -- Multipoint Control
Unit (thanks, Joel)) solutions that might have offered insights into features,
state of development, etc.  Turned out to be a significantly more difficult
project than I'd originally anticipated.

Below are my feelings on the products I was able to find.  Given the lack of a
good reference regarding available options, it's entirely possible I've missed
some; feel free to add your writeup if there's something I've overlooked:

- Openmeetings.  I hesitate to even attempt to assign a URL to this project;
it's recently made the transition to being an Apache Incubator project, and it
has not done so smoothly given my view as someone trying to find out more
information.  The project code is hosted in -- apparently -- two different
repositories; it has a difficult-to-parse PDF (?) as an install guide, no
administrator's guide, and an incomplete user's guide.  The product, itself, is
non-intuitive.  It seems that there's a great deal of development.  It uses a
Flash client (the same one that Big Blue Button uses).  I think Openmeetings is
on the verge of becoming a contender, but I just can't consider it to be there
right now.

- Big Blue Button (bigbluebutton.org) more-or-less requires to be set up on
Ubuntu 10.04 -- I could wish there were a more recent distribution, but, I
guess, at least they chose a long-term support version.  I tried to install on
12.04, to no avail (even after bringing over some missing applications).  It
also lacks an administrative portal: the current thought process for BBB is
that it has these nifty API calls to help set up meetings, and it's got lots of
people who've tied it into Joomla, Drupal, Moodle, etc.  So, aside from these
two caveats, it's really well done, fairly intuitive, and has decent (but not
great) documentation.  It's a/the winner, but not for someone looking for a
solution to "just work" when it's done being set up.  Additional steps *are*
required.  That being said, there's a reasonably active and informed Google
group, and I hope to leverage that, and their docs, in crafting a solution.

- VMukti (formerly 1videoConference, vmukti.com) is what appears to be a
dual-licensed OSS/commercial videoconferencing project that's fairly easy to
use.  The big caveat, though, is that you'd better like Windows: it runs on
Windows, and it's only got clients written in C#.

- Asterisk 10.x (with its fairly new confbridge functionality).  Apparently,
this "kind of" works with video-enabled SIP clients; you can either designate a
meeting leader, or have it switch its video stream between speakers.  But, no
multiplexing of streams, and the switching is, apparently, not very seamless.

- Diastar (projectdiastar.org), a project sponsored by Dialogic but that rides
on top of Asterisk, initially looked great. Turns out, however, that only its
"platform" is truly OSS; add-ons -- like, say, for video conferencing -- costs
extra, and no mention on-site is made of how *much* extra.

I seem to recall checking out at least one or two other options, but I can't
bring their names to mind, so I'm gonna send this off.

-Ken