Hardware Based or Cloud based video conference
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Hi All,
We are planing to have a Video conference solution to our branch offices. Currently one of my office have a Polycom HDX 7000 as video conference solution and I was evaluating the features of Polycom HDX 7000 .
The required features for VC are
- Multi point calls
- Content share (Desktop and mobile)
- Desktop & Mobile client
- schedule meeting
- Record meeting
I was comparing the Video conference solution with Hardware and Cloud based for suggesting to management.
I need your suggestions on VC whether i need to go for Hardware solutions or cloud based solution . What is the advantage over that.
which is the best suitable cloud VC solution . Can any cloud solution integrate to Hardware . Can we integrate cisco webx /skype to Hardware VC.
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If you are going to look at Skype, why not just use Skype?
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Hardware systems seem pretty silly today. That era is over.
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The systems that I see in use the most (and I only see so much so take this with a grain of salt) are Skype, Google Hangouts, Lync and things like that. Any normal PBX will do video conferencing, but you would need a client for smart phones, for example.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Hardware systems seem pretty silly today. That era is over.
Depends on the deployment. 90% of the time software is best. but for large tele-presence systems such as court rooms, conferences etc hardware (and hardware based encoders) will always win.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Depends on the deployment. 90% of the time software is best. but for large tele-presence systems such as court rooms, conferences etc hardware (and hardware based encoders) will always win.
What makes the hardware better? Software encoding can easily go far, far beyond the needs of telepresence systems today. Hardware doesn't really have any computational advantage.
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@scottalanmiller We required to record the video conference meeting and company required a self host or a non-public solution ,as skype and hangout solution is not accepted .
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Hardware doesn't really have any computational advantage.That is so wrong. A purpose built encoding circuit always wins over relying on a computer to do your encoding. Maybe in the SMB that's okay but for critical systems it's not at all. There's also added latency when using a computer to do the encoding.
The latency only matters if it is greater than can be noticed. Software encoding today is lightning fast. SMB vs. Enterprise doesn't impact the personal perception of latency. A phone call quality, for example, is measured the whether the people talking are employees of a big company or a little one. Where have you seen software unable to deliver imperceptible latency, unless you are talking decades old equipment?
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@sreekumarpg said:
@scottalanmiller We required to record the video conference meeting and company required a self host or a non-public solution ,as skype and hangout solution is not accepted .
That's severely limiting in this day and age. What about Jitsi?
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@thecreativeone91 said:
You obliviously haven't worked with any professional video or telecast/conferencing systems..
How would doing so change whether or not software is fast enough? I've seen Cisco gear, software definitely competes really well with that.
What systems do you feel are so professional that IT people would never have seen or heard of them and enterprises not use them? I've worked for some of the world's largest companies and have used their teleconferencing systems. And software totally meets the needs.
Have you teleconferenced in the Fortune 10? In shops of more than, say, 100K users?
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How does hardware compression rates vs. software compression rates compare to WAN latency? If you are doing teleconferencing from NY to London, for example, do you feel that hardware compression is fast enough to even be noticeable?
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Having worked in pro video shops before, one of the things that we found a lot of is that they were suckers for "smoke and mirror" hardware. AV shops have a real tendency to be obsessed with being "special cases" and failing to apply common sense or simple testing to determine when they are being taken advantage of. Storage vendors sell improperly configured, slow and unsafe storage to AV shops by calling it "designed for AV" or whatever. And they rely on the hubris and pride of the AV community to believe that they are special and need better or "special" gear that no one else needs. What they ignore is that they are just getting low end, consumer gear rebranded and that their vendors are laughing at them behind their backs.
I see this as being similar. Vendors like nVidia and AMD/ATI make software compression that is so insanely fast that, while special hardware could be faster, the question is "does the extra speed matter?" There is a reason why, for example, the world's largest bank just uses Lync for teleconferencing and when they use Cisco gear, it looks just the same.
Similarly, Cisco, just as an example, is famous for selling "special hardware" to make their networks fast. Ten years ago, this kind of made sense. But a few years ago people starting showing that off the shelf CPUs with software were blowing the doors off of that special hardware - $100 consumer gear was faster than $3,000 special hardware.
Given that Cisco is a player in both the networking space with special hardware and is the main player in the pro hardware teleconferencing space it seems obvious that they would rely on the same sale tactics.
The march of general purpose hardware to overtake the performance of special purpose hardware is a continuous thing. All specialty hardware eventually falls to the performance of general purpose. This is a standard computing law, much like the law of transistor grow in chips. Video compression is a commodity function today.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Dude.. This obviously isn't your specialty. I've worked in pro video productions most of my life both in post production houses as well as affiliates such as NBC, ABC and CBS along with productions for America's Got talent. They are not "smoke and mirror"; real world test prove the differences.
I think you are confusing "making a television show" with teleconferencing. This is a thread about teleconferencing. What do TV shows have to do with it? Very different workflows.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Maybe you should learn you don't know everything. As I said before Software will be fine for most people, but there are cases where only hardware will meet the need.
Okay, but when you make rude statements like that, back them up. What hardware is this that can make business teleconferencing better than software can do?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Dude.. This obviously isn't your specialty. I've worked in pro video productions most of my life both in post production houses as well as affiliates such as NBC, ABC and CBS along with productions for America's Got talent. They are not "smoke and mirror"; real world test prove the differences.
I think you are confusing "making a television show" with teleconferencing. This is a thread about teleconferencing. What do TV shows have to do with it? Very different workflows.
I didn't just say teleconference systems. I specifically said tel-presence full on teleprsense systems are setup in such a way that the space of wear the video is being broadcast to will look like the place it is being broadcast from using multiple cameras, large tv's projectors to give you the full experience. This is heavily used in court systems here, and software just doesn't cut it.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I didn't just say teleconference systems. I specifically said tel-presence full on teleprsense systems are setup in such a way that the space of wear the video is being broadcast to will look like the place it is being broadcast from using multiple cameras, large tv's projectors to give you the full experience. This is heavily used in court systems here, and software just doesn't cut it.
What kind of gear are they using to do that? And is it above 1080p? Software solutions are definitely delivering 1080p easily these days, in real time.
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I'm not saying that you should use Google Hangouts for something like that. I'm simply saying that software based systems can do the compression. You still need a carefully built system with low latency connections between locations and things like that. It's not a trivial system. But something like Asterisk and pure software, when built for it, will push some extreme high definition video.
Keep in mind that we are discussing systems in this thread that are also pushing desktop sharing, not just video. You can mix that into anything, obviously, but the assumption is that this is desktop level sharing so a hardware solution would need to be at each person's desktop.
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And my point about hardware wasn't that it wasn't potentially faster, certainly you can make some insanely fast hardware. But it was that software compression is fast enough for the need. And in video compression, once you hit fast "enough", it really is "enough." When you are conferencing on a 100ms link, 2ms or 1ms of compression time doesn't matter.
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@scottalanmiller I have tried polycom real presence desktop software to connect to the Hardware device and from that we can share the desktop meanwhile having conference .
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@sreekumarpg said:
@scottalanmiller I have tried polycom real presence desktop software to connect to the Hardware device and from that we can share the desktop meanwhile having conference .
Yes, you can do it. But the compression is happening in software. What value is the hardware providing, in that case?
