Cu-seeme torrent

It is available in its entirety as a torrent , or you can download the mp3 files individually. On November 7th, , we had an interesting panel discussion with some of the folks who helped get our webcast going back in Topics ranged from the early days of audio streaming to more modern subjects such as podcasting and Internet2.

We went official on November 7, , becoming the first radio station in the world to offer a live Internet simulcast of an off-air signal.

This can be seen with the advent of Computer Mediated Communication and it's development over the last 20 years. At first there was computer based communications using e-mail over small networks. As networks grew bigger and the desire for true real-time communications grew, users could use the text based 'talk' program to chat with each other without waiting for a response. Next, the Internet Relay Chat was developed as a need to have a multiuser 'talk' program.

Soon after programs such as Vocaltec's Internet Phone allowed users to actually send voice over the Internet in real time. Today however, we have an application which combines both vocal and text based communications and adds the element of video in an attempt to create the feeling that the people you are chatting with are truly there.

This application is appropriately called CU-SeeMe. As with many applications built today, it was released freely over the Internet to allow users to test it and report and bugs it may have. With the application, you can connect with another user or with multiuser reflectors and participate in real-time videoconferencing. CU-SeeMe supports both text based and vocal communication methods, but it's main draw is it's ability to send video over the Internet.

Factoring in all of the above, and the fact that the software itself is freely available over the Internet, it is no wonder that it is becoming a popular form of communication among Internet users. I was first drawn to CU-SeeMe after reading an article about it in early Like most of the users who frequent it, I had been through all of the text based realms that the Internet had to offer.

Usenet news and Bulletin Boards were too slow, and although IRC offered real-time multiuser chat with real people, there was always that uncertainty about who the person you were talking to really was. I always felt that if I could just see the other people, or hear them even, that it would be much easier to communicate with them and make some real friends.

Enter CU-SeeMe. Who could pass this up? I certainly didn't and I've been off and on ever since. I feel that most of the people on there now are in the same frame of mind. One of the great features of CU-SeeMe is the ability to take part in a Virtual Community by connecting to a reflector.

A reflector is in basic terms, a computer connected to the Internet running software which allows other users to connect and chat with each other in real-time. By connecting to a reflector, users can videoconference with more than 30 users at one time and participate in discussions ranging from general conversation to science.

Most reflectors available today are open to anyone and accomodate a variety of users, from those without cameras or audio capability to users with color cameras and microphone equipped headsets. Reflectors are also for the most part, up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Although there are a large number of reflectors available to join, only a few of them are populated with a lot of people.

I decided to join the Cornell Reflector after finding out that it was the most populized. Apparently most users feel the same way. Most communication takes place via a chat window, which is similar to a chat room type protocal.

Anything a users types into the window can be read by all the other users on the reflector. Much of the community building, explanation of rules and etiquette, and communication takes place within this text window.

Although voice can be transmitted clearly and quickly through CU-SeeMe, it is generally not used and at times frowned upon since most of the users are in public labs, at work in offices, or cannot receive audio at all. In this respect, this application takes a step backwards into the text based realm of earlier methods of computer mediated communication. However, it is again the concept of being able to see the other people that makes all the difference in this case, a concept which has never really been seen before.

How does being able to see the other person change the way you communicate with them? It can be seen that in all other forms of computer mediated communication that the people are basically anonymous and being anonymous leaves a person to do or say anything they want.

Being anonymous allows you to do such things as lie about yourself and treat others with disrespect without any fear of repercussion. For the most part in the computer mediated communication world, being anonymous allows a person to not take any responsibility for their actions, unlike the real world. Thus, there is a lot of chaos occuring today in the text based communications forums.

Flame wars and moderated newsgroups are not uncommon in the Usenet world. IRC gives users the ablity to kick and ban people from a channel.

CU-SeeMe rarely has any of that however simply because being able to see the other person no longer makes you anonymous. The people you are talking to can see what you look like, they can see where you're at, and most importantly, they can see your world. Thus, for the most part, people treat each other with respect and try to carry on a regular conversation with them.

Besides, who knows? You might just see that guy you were acting obnoxious to on CU-SeeMe on the street someday. Just like in real life, there will always be obnoxious and disinhibited people. Most of the problems arise from the "lurkers", the people who participate in CU-SeeMe without cameras. Although a lurker is cameraless, they can still send voice and participate in the chat window and in general, lurkers act in an annoying manner simply because they cannot be seen.

For the most part however, lurkers are ignored both vocally and in the text window. You can turn off the reception of audio for one particular person and you can ignore then in the text window.

After awhile, most of them leave the reflector after realizing that there's no point in participating in a video based communications medium without any video.

Lurkers are not the only probem however. This is achieved by operating on rows of 8 4-bit pixels as bit words throughout the algorithms, achieving a degree of parallelism, in effect.

Written down in mathematical terms with respect to individual pixels, the algorithms look rather goofy, but become appealing when represented in x0 assembly language. As with any compression algorithm, your mileage will vary depending on the nature of the data to compress.

In the case of CU-SeeMe, the most important factor is the amount of motion in the video. Question: What does the little outline box or frame around the video window mean, and why it keeps blinking on and off? Answer: Tim Dorcey said: The black border means that CU-SeeMe is using the general Mac toolbox routine, CopyBits, to update the video window, which it does whenever the video must be cropped i.

Otherwise, CU-SeeMe will draw directly to the screen, which is must faster. The black border is drawn to alert you to the performance penalty, which may or may not be significant depending on how many windows you have open, how often they are being updated, how fast your machine is etc. You can get rid of the border by moving your video window or whatever is obscuring it. In the version 0. In that case, the borders are omitted. Question: "Empty office" video bothers me. What to do?

Answer: Tim Dorcey said: Note also that if you don't like what you see, you can close someone's window. This will terminate the stream from the reflector to you and if nobody is watching a particular stream, it will be terminated from the source to the reflector. So, shut down those windows you don't like! On a bad i.

However, this problem can be circumvented in 0. Finally, I will plead guilty to often broadcasting an empty office "Tim cornell" , but I'm allowed for debugging purposes. Question: Generally, what limits my output frames-per-second? Note also that the cap is automatically adjusted within the user-settable range on the basis of packet-loss reports returned by each person receiving your video. Depending upon other activity on your ethernet, you could probably set the cap much higher.

At some point, then, the processing speed of your machine will become the limiting factor. Question: How can I help to conserve bandwidth?