
"Rendez-Vous", the next generation videoconferencing
tool.
What is Rendez-Vous ?
Rendez-Vous is new Internet videoconferencing tool developed at INRIA
by Frank Lyonnet.
It is in a way the successor to the IVS
tool developed some time ago by Thierry
Turletti, which was one of the first MBone tools available (however
it is a completely new piece of code compared to IVS).
The audio component of Rendez-Vous is an integration of the application
kernel of the FreePhone 3.5
audio
tool developped also at INRIA
by Sacha Fosse-Parisis
and Andres Vega Garcia.
Main features of Rendez-Vous :
-
RTP protocol support over multicast or unicast IP.
-
H261 video standard.
-
High quality PCMU, ADPCM, VADPCM (with HiFi support) and low bandwidth
GSM and LPC audio coding.
-
Mpeg 1/2 file reading / transcoding
Main advanced features of Rendez-Vous :
-
An integrated scheduler for video and audio flow management and processing
(optimization of machine ressources to maximise the suggestive quality
rendered to the user).
-
A great flexibility for insertion of new protocols and coding schemes.
-
A flexible user interface based on the PAC
modeus interactive system model with a custom C++ implementation.
-
Support for layered coding and transmission of video and audio flows.
-
Experimental multiresolution DCT codecs.
-
Great code portability with the use of single process design, ANSI standard,
target system derivation of classes and the use of the PAC model. Rendez-Vous
is portable without pain on every system provided an ANSI C and C++ compiler
exists for it (gcc is fine).
Who should care for Rendez-Vous ?
Who should NOT care for Rendez-Vous :
Rendez-Vous is not intended to be commercial product. We, the RODEO
team at INRIA are a small research group, part of a French public institute.
In no case we recommend Rendez-Vous for a buisness or even personnal use.
We will not provide any support for such use of Rendez-Vous.
Who should care for Rendez-Vous :
Rendez-Vous is an experimental research tool. It has been developped in
order to be an ideal testbed for some hot topics such as layered video
and audio transport and coding, Forward Error Correction for video and
audio on the Internet, wireless and satellite links access to the Internet.
As a side effect of this primary goal, Rendez-Vous can also be used for
personnal use by people with an adventurous mind.
We at INRIA have for example used Rendez-Vous for several events such
as :
The SIGCOMM '97 video and audio MBONE broadcasting.
Several demos showing the advantage of a satellite access to the Internet.
Supported systems :
-
Sun Sparc Solaris machines, internal audio hardware, SunVideo and VigraPix
grabbers
-
Sgi Irix machines, internal audio hardware, no video grabbing
-
x86 Linux machines, VoxWare audio by Sacha Fosse-Parisis, no video grabbing
-
x86 FreeBSD machines, VoxWare audio by Sacha Fosse-Parisis, no video grabbing
-
Dec OSF1 machines, no audio, no video grabbing
-
Windows 95 machines, DirectX 5.0 audio, VideoForWindows (QuickCam only) and Matrox Meteor grabbing
Availability of Rendez-Vous :
You can retreive latest versions (1.0.2) here for those plateforms
:
You can also download sdr plugins for audio
and video.
If you experience troubles with the above URLs you can try our ftp site
: zenon.inria.fr.
The following OSes should be be supported :
Sun Solaris, Sun SunOS, SGI Irix, DEC OSF1, x86 Linux, x86 FreeBSD,
Windows 95, Windows NT.
If you are interressed by a Mac OS version please shout here.
Screenshots :
-
Click here for some Rendez-Vous screenshots.
Documentation :
-
Click here for the history of Rendez-Vous revisions.
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Click here for the known bugs of Rendez-Vous.
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Click here for the quick start notice of Rendez-Vous.
-
Click here for the copyright notice of Rendez-Vous.
This page is copyright Frank Lyonnet 1996,
visitors since November 10th 1997
Frank.Lyonnet@inria.fr