Video phones and features supported by them

This article describes a typical video phone, the common features supported by them, specific features they support for bandwidth, display, camera, voice etc. We provide a global picture of the functionality and technologies supported by today’s video phone.Video phones enable you to see the person while talking to them (If they are also having a video phone). It looks like a normal phone but there is an extra LCD wide screen and a camera attached to it. Some video phones also support a headset. Needless to say, they are IP phones and they either integrate with an external IP PBX for voice or register the voice clients in their own server. That depends on the vendor and their architecture/solution.

Features supported by a Video phone:

¤ Video phones support handset, headset and also a speaker phone. Most of them support wide band audio for better quality.

¤ Video phones have a LCD display (Wide – 16:9 resolution) and they are generally big enough to see a video. But the sizes are dependant on the vendors and some of them even support touch screen displays. Some of them even support WXGA resolution for the LCD display.

¤ The camera is usually placed on the top of the LCD display as close as possible to the eye levels. This is important to view the persons face in the right angle. They come with privacy shutters.

¤ Some video phones support CIF (352 x 288) resolution and some others support w448p (768 x 448). They generally are able to support SIP and H.264 standards for voice and video and support enough bandwidth – 768 Kbps or over 1 Mbps depending on the vendor.

¤ They have a built in two port switch to connect the PC using the single cable which comes to the desk and hence the built-in switch supports 1Gbps.

¤ Video phones support multi-conference and in some of them, you can add another user by dialling to them while on the call.

¤ They support echo-cancellation for better clarity and the user could mute the audio or video separately when they don’t want it in the call.

¤ They support the voice switch features like call forward, transfer, voice mail box etc. In fact some of them even come with the voice mail indicator light. But this also depends on the way they integrate to the main system.

¤ Some video phones support dual stream – voice and data and enables a user to view presentations while he is on a video call. In some of them, you can watch the other person in the main screen and yourself on the small PIP window in a corner.

¤ Some of them provide an API – Application Programming Interface to enable developers to create and launch applications specific to the video phone.

¤ Some video phones come with an integrated XML browser.

¤ Video phones generally support AES Standards based 128 bit encryption for security of the voice and video traffic between them. They also have an admin password to change any settings.

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