Video conference +IRC

Dolguldur · none Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 3

Messenger and similar programs are eating up their portion of chat users ¿why? they are easy (VERY) to use, you can videocam a friend and send /receive pictures easily without having to configure firewalls...

Are IRC Networks ready for this?
Can you include videoconference in Mirc programs? jabber?

ideas?

Ashen · Idler Joined: 05 Jan 2004 Posts: 285

I never seen a way to do this.

You can send still pictures back and forth using /dcc send, and I think some clients may have other means of connecting a video feed, but IRC itself is a text-based medium that does not support streaming video as far as I know.

-Ashen

uchat · Idler Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 335

Video conferencing was tried by at least 1 IRC Client back in the 90's. That IRC client is no longer updated and has been abandoned. IRC is a text only medium, so the prorocol it's self would either have to be re-written to support video or an additonal RFC should be done to keep every standardized. As it was done with DCC.

al5001 · Lurker Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 181 Location: Canada

If you have more money than brains, you can purchase conferenceroom enterprise for a wallet-robbing price of $5000 and use videoconference+IRC using its Java Applet. This would be useful only if you ran online tutorials or courses and gained profit from it in a business.

Jason · Posted: Jun 20, 2004 5:38pm Post subject:

I don't consider any of these add-ons part of IRC.

It's a client feature, that happens to be available within an IRC client, but it doesn't have anything to do with IRC since the transfer of images, sound, video, etc happens outside of the IRC protocol.

Now, if we compare this with ... say, shockwave and the WWW, I consider shockwave part of the WWW simply because it's transfered the same way images, html, etc are. It's a new feature of the WWW, not one that exists outside of it.

Dolguldur · none Joined: 17 Mar 2004 Posts: 3

Because I dont want to use Messenger to do it, I would like to integrate both in one.
We have a poll in IRC Hispano and MOST of IRC users would not user messenger if they could use video in their queries.

Furthemore many firewalls, and routers block the DCC so you can't send files. Another reason to leave IRC and go to messenger. (please don't tell me you can cofigure your firewall, 99% of users don't want/know how to do it)

And I know chat is a text based protocol, and I know web browsing was based on text too, untile someone said "why can we transfer images?" and here we go, everyone is surfing now...

magpie · Idler Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 454 Location: Essex, UK

If most peoples' firewalls and routers block DCC connections, how do you propose to transfer the video? It's not feasible to transfer the data via the IRC server, and I'm not sure admins would be too happy about that anyway - talk about bandwidth usage.

MSN Messenger has only recently been able to transfer data when both users are behind NAT gateways, and again it's _very_ slow.

The best thing to do is to teach people how to configure their firewall/router properly (it really isn't difficult, it simply involves reading the manual).

Jason · Posted: Jun 25, 2004 8:28am Post subject:

Many years ago, I recall a client sending the video/audio data via the IRC server, I guess it was uuencoded and sent as plaintext into the channel. The client had all the users going to one specific network and channel. They ended up being banned and the channel closed.

It would cripple most IRC servers if they had thousands of users streaming video and audio through IRC instead of directly to each other.

magpie · Idler Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 454 Location: Essex, UK

Indeed it would. I suspect the delay in sending via the server would lead to poor quality output anyway, especially if it has to travel from one end of a large network to the other.