Video Conferencing Equipment
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Running a global business is made easier with video conferencing equipment. Now offices in New Jersey, California and Japan can not only all collaborate verbally, but they can all view the same white board recording their brainstorming session located in the New Jersey plant. The ability to simultaneously watch a demonstration of a product or view a chalk board is very beneficial in today's world. There are certain situations that email communications and an endless trail of attachments will not help. Video conferencing software allows communication in those places where a mere telephone call or email is insufficient.
A video conference is a meeting between multiple people in various locations using two way video and audio technologies. This type of meeting could be between just two people, each at different sites. A conference between two people is called a point-to-point conference. If the meeting involves more than two people at more than two sites it is referred to as a multi-point conference. This type of technology is not new. As long as there have been televisions, there was the capability to visually have a conference. In the early stages, those wanted to have visual remote meetings would hook two closed circuit televisions together by a cable. This technology utilizes analog signals. In fact, the first manned space shuttle flights communicated to NASA using UHF and VHF radio frequencies. One was pointed toward Earth; the other toward the shuttle. Television channels, until recently, used this sort of makeshift video conferencing software to transmit news at remote locations. Now, however, they receive almost all visual and audio information via satellite.
Transmission in this matter soon fell out of favor due to slow speed and amount of expensive equipment necessary. It was not sufficient for distance learning, business meetings and other similar applications. Next on the scene were the telephone companies. Many telephone companies wanted to try their hands at sending visual data over telephone lines. This was called telephony. These held some promise of improvement, but failed to gain in popularity due to a poor picture quality and lack of visual data compression abilities. What this meant for the user was that the memory and bandwidth necessary to transmit the picture made it too slow to be practical. Until the ability to compress the image, thus making it a smaller file and able to be sent quicker, the telephony technology was simply unable to compete in the world of video conferencing equipment.
All was not lost. By the 1990s digital telephony made the bit rate quite a bit quicker, and video and audio compression was the norm. Now the file sizes were small enough to travel over the wires quickly, and digital media no longer was the sluggish medium that analog once was. From here, visual conference software was no longer expensive, proprietary technology, but was available to the general public for a fairly reasonable amount. As the 1990s progressed, IP (Internet Protocol) was the basis for the next wave of video conferencing equipment development. With IP signal and continual improvements being made to visual data compression technology, video conferencing software was eventually available for personal computers and desktop processors in offices across the United States. The advancements are as such that now internet providers offer plug-ins that make video conferencing possible to anyone with a computer camera and internet capabilities. Though, in these mass produced plug-in, free-ware types of audio and visual sharing programs the picture quality is notably worse than that found in the stand alone video conferencing equipment.
At the heart of visual conference technology is compression of visual and audio information to display them accurately in real time. This compression is made possible by a piece of hardware called a codec. Codec stands for code and decode. Besides a codec, there are a few other necessary components that make up the video conferencing software and hardware used in many remote meetings. Some sort of visual input device, like a recording camera is necessary to form the original image. To receive a picture; a visual output device is necessary. Visual output devices include: computer monitors, television screens or projectors. Audio receiving devices, such as a microphone are needed to record the voice of the speaker. On the receiving end, microphones are needed to hear the sound recorded by the speaker. All of these devices need a path to transmit the data on. This path can be either analog or digital telephone lines, LAN lines or broadband internet.
There are two main categories of visual meeting systems. There are the dedicated systems. Dedicated systems have all the necessary components all packaged into one piece of technology. It is usually a console and a high-end video camera. These dedicated systems can range from the elaborate and expensive with large projectors appropriate for large global corporations to small packages ideal for individuals. The other type of video conferencing software is that loaded onto personal desktop computers. Most desktop computers are video compatible, so purchasing a camera and software makes impromptu virtual meetings a reality, even for the individual.
Even as easy as remote visual meetings are becoming, not everyone is comfortable with them. One main drawback is lack of eye contact. Because the speaker is not really looking at the recipient, they appear to be avoiding eye contact. Thought the recipient knows it is the fault of the technology, it is still hard to feel the personal affection of the speaker. A second drawback is that many people are leery about being video-taped. Most people are comfortable making phone calls or sending emails, but would think twice about being taped for a virtual meeting. "Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee." (Proverbs 7:15)
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