Videoconferencing

Exchanging Audio, Text and Moving Images in Realtime
(Mathias Fuchs, Visiting Professor for Music and Media/ Sibelius Academy Helsinki, Lecturer/ University of Applied Arts Vienna
and Universität für Musik Vienna)

There is number of programmes available at present, providing for audio-visual communication via the INTERNET or in a LAN. These programmes use different compression algorithms to reduce the amount of data which has to be transferred between the computers. Uncompressed video- and audio-data would require bandwidths of the connecting lines which are not available on consumer level.

The software compressing the data to be transferred is called a "codec". Depending on the data source, codecs are called "audio codecs" or "video codecs". In general the quality of the signal received is better for higher bandwidths and worse for lower bandwidths. A good and efficient codec can help however.

	CUSeeMe	Version 3.1.2 (for Macs and PC)	White Pine Inc. (former versions developed by Cornell University's Cornell Research Inc.)
	CUSeeMe	Version 5 (PC only)	CUSeeMe Networks Inc.
	i-Visit	Version 26b7 (for PC) and 26b6 (for Macintoshes)	Eyematic Interfaces Inc.
	netmeeting	Version 3.0.1 (PC only)	Microsoft Corporation
	ClearPhone		Internet Communications Technologies