update July 2005.

Sorry guys but I've purchased a commercial standalone video conferencing application for my company's requirements, after a year and a half of offering this bounty I just cant wait any longer.

I've left this bounty here for historical purposes and to encourage someone to develop this for a wider audience.
To be honest I dont understand why more fuctionality isn't being placed on the video side of asterisk but i guess it will get there one day.

If anyone has some ideas for video that they are looking for investment/seed money in exchange for equity then feel free to follow me up but this bounty is now closed.

Cheers,
Dean


Additional update November 2005

Well just wanted to give some feedback, I decided not to go with the www.smiletiger.com solution, as good as it was their sales and support was pitiful while I was performing the trials. I ended up going with a macromedia flash communications server solution. It does mean that it is a pure video and voice server and doesn't allow for desktop or application sharing but I can live with that.

Best money I ever spent. Ended up costing me about US$1,500 but I can now run a 10 person streaming video conference with crystal clear audio and video (breakdown of costs was $500 for macromedia license, $500 for seperate standalone server, $500 to my friend to build the application and install it for me).

I really wish this could have been incorporated into Asterisk but for the moment at least it's a standalone operation.

Cheers,
Dean



Further Additional Update January 2006

My company Cognation Pty Ltd and Unisona Ltd have taken a decision to sell this in house developed application.
It will run on either linux or windows server 2003, and utilises macromedia communications server 1.5 (Macromedia licenses are sold in either 10 user license either $450 or 100 seat $4500).

Either server supplied or use your own hardware. Pricing still to be determined but the advantage of this over webex or Breeze is you own the application outright no per minute charges.

You can control bandwidth use through choosing quality and video sizing at installation.

Allows multi-room voice and video conferencing, ppt share and chat. Best of all no download component (just uses flash)

Current external customers include TNT and Skoda.

Its still fairly new but you can check for updates here www.cognation.net/unisona as this product is developed for an externally marketable solution.

Cheers,
Dean












OLD BOUNTY INFO

I'm prepared to kick off a bounty to get some form of video conference "meet me" solution going.

My specifications would be for a minimum of 4 people in the conference and to have some form of web page control, kick off-join-mute, mute all.

I pledge $US500 to begin with however I may be able to increase that should someone show me something fruitful.

Anyone else able to/want to kick in some pledges to make this happen.
Any other reasonable feature sets that people want included?


Cheers,
Dean



Status
Bounty announced 11/01/04
Bounty bumped to $US1,000 11/04/04
Bounty bumped to $2000 12/08/04
bounty bumped to $3,000 11/5/5

Date Started
Bounty posted on 11/01/04


Contributions
Dean Collins $US3000


Contact
Please contact Dean Collins ( dean at collins.net.pr ) for any contributions to this, or if you'd like to work on it.


Requirements:
Minimum 4 people
web page control
kick off
join
mute
mute all

11/04/04
ability for meet me moderator to make an outbound call to join conference

Bounty bumped to $US1,000 11/04/04
I've been able to secure some pledges from 2 people outside of the asterisk community that should this feature be made available that they will contribute $300 and $200 respectively.
This bounty now stands at $US1,000.
So far I haven't received any interest from any developers to work on this, please contact me dean at collins.net.pr should you be interested.


12/08/04
Bounty bumped to $2000 funding through secondary interests.


11/5/5
Bounty bumped to $3,000 some functionality and performance requirements added.
Please contact me under NDA for details.









Alternative idea
(added 04Nov04 stevek)
This is not what Dean asked for (so, unless he and the other sponsors agree, bounties don't apply to this), but it is what I would do for video conferencing and how I would implement it. I'm just writing this in the hope that they might also be interested in this. (I will probably do this eventually, but likely not for many months):

Add video support to app_conference
I'd do a simple switching system by having the video sent to participants "follow the speaker". In the simple case, each participant would get the video stream sent by the active speaker. If more than one participant is speaking, there would be some kind of arbitration to choose which video feed to show. NOTE: Video feeds could only be switched to on keyframes. This is a bit easier to implement in app_conference than in meetme because (a) app_conference operates on whole frames already, and (b) app_conference is VAD-aware already (soon, we'll add more VAD support using CNG frames).

I'm not sure what Dean's application is — this would send only one video stream out to each participant. I think most hardphones and softphones will only expect one video stream..

   * Proposed video display priority
         o User is not oneself (true has precedence)
         o User is speaking (true has precedence)
         o User has video feed (true has precedence)
         o User is presenter (true has precendence)
         o Time user began speaking most recently (later has precedence)
         o Alphabetical, or some random order..