Video Conferencing Software

[whitehotdawn]

I want to setup a video conferencing system to keep in touch with my office in NJ and my house in Oregon. The office has a T1 connection and my house has DSL with a 512 Kpbs connection. I've been doing research on the various systems and I am lost as to which systems would work the best. We have a limited budget and would like to spend somewhere between $400-$1000 for the whole system. For the office system we have a 38in. LCD TV that can be used with the screen and for the home I have a 20in. LCD that I would like to use. Some of the systems require a dedicated server to host the conference*--we have servers at the office we could use for this purpose.

I know that iChat and MSN have video conferencing capabilities. How reliable are these programs and what type of quality do they provide?
Which software/system would you recommend.

Thanks, sean.

 

[RiverDog]

There is a big difference between a video conference and a web conference. Microsoft is more of a web conference. The quality of the Microsoft type product is marginal. The viewing window is only 160 x 120 pixels and a low frame rate (usually under 15 FPS). This makes for a very tiny area to view the participants. On the other hand a true video conference uses full screen viewing (on a monitor) or connected to a LCD, and up to 30 frames per second (normal TV quality). One of the best is the Polycom VSX3000 but the price is around $2800. You won?t be able to install a complete video conference system much cheaper then that. This is a self contained unit. A lot depends on what exactly you want to do. One quick and easy solution is to use Polycom PVX software (around $125). You can try it from their web site for free and the only restriction is the 5 minute time limit. In case you?re wondering, I don?t work for Polycom but ran the video conference center for a government agency. We had over $100,000 in that room alone.