Well, as you're aware, you need to have low-latency codecs and
encoding chains for live conferencing to work at all. Netmeeting was
the previous program used for that, but the complexity of the H323
protocol never really made it a serious contender when you put a NAT
and/or firewall in place.
One option which supercedes netmeeting in many areas is Conference XP
http://www.conferencexp.net/community/Default.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1
There is SDK and documentation for this, including source code.
Without doing an over-generous amount of research, I can't tell you
for sure if you can only use port 80 connections to host your
meetings, but I'm definitely sure if your entire LAN is blocked form
the internet, then *nothing* will work (there must be *some
connectivity unless you plan on using pixie dust !)
Probably you'd want to set up something like a reflector service in
your DMZ, which is carefully firewalled to allow only connections to
internal clients (so you've a day or two of checking your NAT and
firewalling rules ahead)
In other peer to peer space, Skype now does video as does MSN
messenger - but you're equally likely to run into issues of
connections. Skype does seem to require peer to peer connections made
in an unsolicited manner as packets traverse skype nodes, so if your
firewall refuses all connection attempts, you're SOL and would need a
stateful packet filter in place to decide what's good to go and what's
dropped.
HTH
Cheers - Neil Smith
MVP Digital Media
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/mvpfaqs |
