From: turletti@jerry.inria.fr (Thierry Turletti)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: New version of IVS now available
Keywords: videoconferencing, H.261 CODEC
Date: 27 Jan 93 17:30:36 GMT
Organization: INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis (Fr)

Version 2.1 of IVS is now available from avahi.inria.fr in the file
/pub/videoconference/ivs.tar.Z.

The INRIA Videoconferencing System (IVS) is a tool to support
audio and video conferences over the Internet. It includes a
software codec, a dynamic admission control mechanism integrated
in the codec, and a protocol to manage the participants in a
videoconference (e.g. add a new participant to a conference
already in progress).

This version includes a lot of changes & improvements. Here are the main
changes:

	* All Motif calls have been removed. Now, the Athena toolkit is used. 
	  A scrollbar is used to display the list of participants. (The
          previous display was not very fast...) This list of participants
          begins first with your local station, the active stations and then,
          the passive stations.

	* A rate control option for video data is added. Two possibility of
	  control are available:

	    - Privilege Quality - In this mode, the frame rate is reduced in
	                          order not to overrun the maximum rate
				  selected. Useful for still images...

	    - Privilege frame rate - In this mode, no delay is added. The
				  control rate is done using the quantizer and
                                  the movement detection's threshold. These
                                  parameters are dynamically
				  chosen to fit in
                                  the bandwidth selected.


	* IVSD (IVS daemon) added. Running it in background allows
          you to be called by anyone on the Internet. A small icon will
          appear and a message will pop up when an ivs talk is requested. If
          you click on the "Accept" option, an ivs command will be run
          automatically towards your party. For example, if you want to call
          asterix@obelix.fr, just run ivs obelix.fr
          Then, if you click on the "Call up" button, the ivs request is
          sent to the obelix.fr host. If you click on the icon, you will be
          able to initiate an IVS session in unicast or multicast mode.

	* A new button allows to freeze the image.

	* Now, local display selection, audio encoding mode and VideoPix port 
	  input may be changed during encoding.

	* The audio driver is now automatically closed when there is no audio
	  data encoding/decoding.

        * The video bandwidth and the frame rate are now displayed at the
          encoder side.

	* Speed improvements

	* Port numbers are now differents in unicast mode. In this way an
   	  unicast call may be done during a multicast conference.

	* Video and audio decoding options are now implicit except for
	  your local station. To disable this mode, use the -a|-v options
 	  (see manual).

	* IVS is now supporting :

		 # SPARCSTATIONS (audio + video)
		   --> VideoPix framegrabber
		   --> Parallax framegrabber [Thanks to Edgar Ostrowski and
                                                        Frank Ruge]

		 # SGI (audio + video) [Thanks to Guido van Rossum]
    
		 # HP (audio + video)
		   --> Raster Rops framegrabber [Thanks to Edgar Ostrowski, 
					    Frank Ruge and Markus Rebensburg]

		 # DECSTATIONS (only video decoding ...) 


Note that in the same ftp-site, a report ivs_report.ps.Z describes the
previous version.

Hope that you will appreciate this new version,


  Thierry Turletti.                       

-- 
Thierry Turletti  - Project RODEO - INRIA sophia-Antipolis - FRANCE