Rajeev R. K. wrote:
Correction, it's already been done before, both byu hobbyists and professionally. I have even set up a system for a couple of clients of mine using HD quality Digital Camcorders. Interfacing was through ieee1394(firewire, dvgrab), Encoded into Theora Video(ffmpeg2theora) and Streamed(via Icecast), Played at the remote end using both mplayer and VLC, an end to end Free Software HD Video Distribution system. There is even a GUI for it, though i havent personally used it... CLI Rules ;) (theorur, or something like that... google for it)
Now, all that is needed to turn this into a conference, is a camera and linux box at the other end, and voila, we have a 2 way video conference. Now, if someone wants to have this set up, as a demo at HBCSE or somewhere, i'll be glad to do it, as part of a lug talk. Sadly, i have only 1 firewire capable camcorder.. so someone else will have to pony up a second camcorder, and the bandwidth too.
That is encouraging news. Lets hope something positive come out of it (the other cam).