vic

Name:

vic

Version:

2.8 (2.6 uses older version of H.261 payload format)

Description:

network video conferencing tool

Organization:

LBNL, University College London

Contact:

Steve McCanne

Email:

vic@ee.lbl.gov

WWW:

http://www-nrg.ee.lbl.gov/vic/ or at UCL (recent versions)

Platforms:

DEC, FreeBSD (also fixes memory leaks in vic-2.8 and supports Tcl/Tk 8.0; patches applicable to all), HP, Linux, SGI, SunOS, Solaris (with Osprey (MMAC) 1500 video card, Osprey 150), Windows

Frame grabber:

Sun VideoPix, SunVideo (Sun Solaris), Osprey, PC codecs, video4linux API

Note on Osprey 150: If you get the message no video capture device found, do the following:

1. If you have a symbolic link /dev/rtvc0 pointing to /dev/o1c[0-9]* (literally, not as a regular expression, with brackets and star), remove the link and install

   ln -s /dev/o1c0 /dev/rtvc0
   

2. Make sure that /opt/SUNWopi/config/opi.devices exists and contains

   sw    opisw
   o1c    opio1c
   

3. Make sure that /opt/SUNWopi/lib/ contains the libraries libopio1c.so and libopisw.so.

A pre-compiled version of vic can be found at ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/schulzrinne/.

Video encodings:

nv, JPEG, H.261, CELB, SCR, MPEG (via an extension), JPEG

Audio encodings:

-

Availability:

source, binary

ftp:

ftp.ee.lbl.gov/conferencing/vic

Network:

IP multicast, unicast, RSVP

RTP Status:

RFC 1889, RFC 1890

Notes:

Vic-Display capabilities for different systems and X servers;

The use of the Osprey 1500 video card requires compiling vic with the grabber-o1k-xil.cc file from MMAC.

parameters

-XtransmitOnStartup=true
-Xframerate=30

The "-u script" option allows you to specify a Tcl script that will be evaluated when vic starts up. A sample script to start transmission and set frame rate/bandwidth is given below.

        # set bandwidth to 40 (the '50' is a Tcl priority number)
        option add Vic.bandwidth 40 50
        # set framerate to 10
        option add Vic.framerate 10 50

        # The procedure named 'user_hook' is called when vic starts up,
        # so I'm using this procedure to start transmission.

        proc user_hook {} {
                global transmitButton transmitButtonState
                if { ![winfo exists .menu] } {
                        build.menu
                }
                if { [$transmitButton cget -state] != "disabled" } {
                        set transmitButtonState 1
                         transmit
                }
                destroy .menu
        }

This script can be in any directory, but give the full pathname on the vic command line.