Check out Open H.323. See if you can get OpenPhone to work to connect two Windows machines together. Or one Windows machine and one OSX machine.
Last night I tried this, and failed. I even tried Netmeeting <-> ohphonex (the OS X client), and it connected — but no audio/video packets were transmitted. (Don’t tell me to try Netmeeting <-> Netmeeting on two windows machines.)
This is insane. Open H.323 has been around for years now, I would have figured they would have implemented the damn thing correctly by now. That it would at LEAST work for the same program communicating between two different computers. On the same platform no less!
But it doesn’t. And I can’t figure out why. Not even with both sides not using any NAT or firewalls.
The only telling sign: incoming connects say they’re coming frommy IP instead of the remote side’s IP. Attempted connects say that the other side “refused” my call.
I give up…
Hmm. I was pondering the same thing.
I did look like software left to rot.
I’ll have to try, as I would love to be able to do video calls to my family.
humm never heard of them before..
Well I think the biggest challenge is still crossplatform. I hear teamspeak works okay with windows / linux/freebsd, ichat av works wonderfully, but of course, thats mac only thing.. :/
The nasty NAT-broken garbage that is most videoconf. stuff I’ve tried is unbelievable…
A friend and I did manage to get both video and audio functioning between two copies of Yahoo’s messenger client, though. (I was behind NAT, he was not.) Not sure about PC/Mac cross-platformyness though :/
I had to try to get this up and running a little over a year ago, and eventually gave up. A bunch o’ crap. Found you via AH, btw.
Hi, I just tried
openphoneon Windows behind NAT andgnomemeetingand ‘ohphone’ on Linux behind firewall, and that worked pretty well
after some tweaking.
The issues I had were mostly port firewalling. The problems you had
were almost certainly due to default options being not quite right.
There are several critically important options in setting up an
H.323 connection and they are not well documented or explained.
I would suggest trying with
ohphoneas well asopenphone, andmaking sure that if your PCs have two interfaces, the address of the
external interface is the one to which the application binds. Also,
do use the NAT option and set the NAT address to your external address.
As to why so much of existing commercial and free software is so
shoddy, well, it’s social factors, and it’s only going to get worse.