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I was told to come here to find out more about creating a webcast/webconference with hamachi vpn + vncserver + skype (I only know what skype is) Have no clue what hamachi is, though it sounds like some sort of japanese food 

Hah!  Hi Dax

You can find info about hamachi here.

It's actually named after sushi!  But what is it?  It's a zero config virtual private network solution.  That allows anybody to connect to another private network in a secure encrypted fashion over the internet.  All of the resources available on the private network become available to the user.

We are experimenting with it to secure a vnc connection (virtual network computing)  that allows others to see (and control) a desktop on someone's computer.  We're trying to use this set up to create a learning/conferencing environment.

We're using skype for voice.  So there's the readers-digest version of what we're playing with.  BTW, welcome to J101!

-Scott

I'm not sure that that's what I'm trying to accomplish.  I wanted to add a product for sale on my website where students can sign up for a scheduled video lesson (either live video or recorded)  But it should be in the form of a "room" wherein the instructor is present to field questions that the students have during and/or after the video is done.  So far, I've found these three sites/services that appear to do what I want, but not entirely sure about any of them yet:

VMukti Meeting Place

ePresence

Dimdim

We've played with two of these.  Dimdim worked but was wwwaaayyyy too slow and unreliable.  Also VMukti we played with but gave up when we found out that the users would have to install .net framework 3.0 on their computers (excluding linux users then).  Even then we couldn't connect.  Not a good solution imo.

However, ePresence we haven't seen.  I'll check that out and see what it's like.

We decided to create our own using hamachi+vnc+skype.

I think you just like saying "hamachi"    When you say Dimdim was slow and unreliable, were you showing live video?  I think live video would present a lot of problems.  While I have a high quality camera used for shooting DVDs, the video would still have to get encoded and uploaded to the web and all that.  The more I think about it, the more I'd rather just have a pre-recorded video play and have the chatroom environment set up for interaction. Would dimdim work ok for something like that?

Well, it won't show video unless you share an applicaton like mediaplayer.  But then that's probably not going to be good at all because of the slow frame rate. 

By slow I mean that the frame rate is slow to unuseable.  Even showing static content like a desktop was not good.

surely these things ought to be done outside of joomla first, then when stable implemented in joomla ?
you don't want streaming and protocol problems to get jumbled up with joomla specific problems in the beginning i think.

No, we're not talking about integrating them with Joomla! (at least not yet)  We're experimenting with tools to help us collaborate / learn together. 

We've played around with ePresence now for awhile.  It seems like a great product but has a few kinks to work out.  I'm engaged in open dialog with the developers and it appears that some very nice things are close to being released.

It is reported (and demonstrated) that live capture video does in fact work for a webcast using ePresence.  That video capture can be from a camera or from a desktop screencast. 

As for allowing folks to purchase lessons via Joomla!, I don't know of any extensions that would allow for that.  One thought I had was using a payapl feature that would direct your users to a url of your choosing.  From there you could stream the lesson.  It's ot an elegant solution but I think it would work.

More to follow!  If you want to follow the descussion about ePresence, you can watch this thread.

seadap wrote:No, we're not talking about integrating them with Joomla! (at least not yet)  We're experimenting with tools to help us collaborate / learn together. 

We've played around with ePresence now for awhile.  It seems like a great product but has a few kinks to work out.  I'm engaged in open dialog with the developers and it appears that some very nice things are close to being released.

It is reported (and demonstrated) that live capture video does in fact work for a webcast using ePresence.  That video capture can be from a camera or from a desktop screencast. 

As for allowing folks to purchase lessons via Joomla!, I don't know of any extensions that would allow for that.  One thought I had was using a payapl feature that would direct your users to a url of your choosing.  From there you could stream the lesson.  It's ot an elegant solution but I think it would work.

More to follow!  If you want to follow the descussion about ePresence, you can watch this thread.

great thanks....i would check it out....funny i was just having some discussions with friends on the same subject just a few days ago. Have not heard of ePresence, i think whoever or whatever technique used, screen size must be adjustable. An inch square sounds within reach for now on Internet. Of course you could go big big screen on LAN. There's a lot of talk of Wimax and other broadband solutions but they don't deliver. The fundamental is that so long as bandwidth is not on dedicated basis and is being shared, we will always be limited.

Essentiially, just pure streming isn't going to be enough i think. A meaningful protocol has to be built into it, and hardwares responding to the protocols, but i am in dreamland. Reality has it that everthing is dumped on the same bandwidth. Would be interesting to see what ePresence or whoever else has to offer.