Recording and Streaming of Video Conference sessions

Introduction: Video Conferencing end points are widely used to conduct video conference sessions. So, when you want to see and discuss with some one far away, you just use the video conferencing endpoints to dial (over ISDN or IP) the remote party and use a display (TV), speakers, camera and mic to see and speak to the person on the other side. This has become as simple as making a VOIP phone call.

But this is generally restricted to the people who can attend the VC session in the conference room or people who have the Personal Video Conference solutions installed in their systems. There are always some people who may not be able to attend the session but still the information might be critical for them. There may be a large gathering to which the speech might be applicable, but is restricted to a selected few as all of them cannot be accommodated in the conference room. And there might be so many people far away – in other countries for example, who could also benefit from the video conference session. The recording and streaming solutions for video conferencing are meant for that.

Generally the recording and streaming solutions are provided by the Video conferencing vendors themselves and it might be a hardware or software solution, depending on the vendor. They are centrally managed, and some of them integrate with Active Directory/LDAP for centralized authentication and management. They come with advanced monitoring capabilities like being able to calculate how many live streaming connections are going on at a given point of time, how many times a particular content has been viewed etc.

Applications: You can use such solutions in education, for recording a guest lecture (for example) and stream it for all the students to either see it live or access the archives later. They are also useful for enterprise training sessions, where the trainer is located far away. They can be useful in the health care industries to record surgeries for training purpose. These are general examples, and there can be much more applications enabled through streaming and recording of video conferencing sessions.

Recording: You can record the video conference session either through the video conferencing unit or through the streaming and recording server. It dials in through the multi-conference gateway protocol to record sessions. You can record single point (only the presenter, one side), point to point (participants on both sides) and multi-point (participants in multiple sites) video conferencing sessions. You can also record the presentation (if any) along with the video. You can also record the video in High Definition format (720p and 1080p) in addition to the H.320, H.323 and SIP sessions. Based on the vendor, there may be a limitation for the number of sessions for simultaneous recording/playback.

Streaming and Editing: You can stream (certain number of concurrent sessions) live in real time to a limited number of users who can view it through their browser through a PC/laptop in the network. They can see a single stream (one presenter) or even side by side layouts (for multi-conferencing sessions). So, the screen might be split in to two to accommodate two speakers (sites) or speaker and presentation. There are two types of streaming:

¤ Unicast: In a unicast stream, each client receives a distinct stream and only for those clients who request it. So, the number of concurrent sessions to the server is increased this way but additional functionalities like playback etc. can be enabled with a unicast stream. This is recommended for a low number of users viewing the stream simultaneously as many recording and streaming servers limit the number of simultaneous streaming connections and if you need a detailed log report of the sessions viewed by individual clients.

¤ Multicast: In a multicast stream, the server streams to an multicast IP address on the network and the clients subscribe to the IP address to receive the stream. So, it is one to many type of streaming. Using this type of streaming is useful for a large audience as the no. of concurrent streaming sessions for the server might be less even though more audiences are accommodated. But for this type of streaming, the routers must also be multicast enabled (able to transmit to class D IP addresses). Some options like playback etc. might be limited but the content can be streamed to a larger audience (provided the network supports). This is useful if the server capacity or network bandwidth is limited.

¤ Editing: The video which is recorded can be edited – the opening and closing portion of the VC session where there is no much information can be cut, the video can be divided in to various parts and labelled accordingly and other changes can be done.

Playback: The video sessions which were edited and recorded can be archived suitably (based on date, topic etc.) so that the users can access the presentation at a later date for On-demand playback. These archives are generally stored and accessed in a web-based application and can be searched based on keywords. The playback of the videos can also be done from the video conferencing endpoint itself or can be viewed on the Internet /LAN. They support offline conversion of the videos to more common formats like MPEG4 or Quicktime so that they could be played by normal players like Real player etc. They can also be downloaded in the mobile for viewing it on the go (after appropriate conversion). Encoding and Trans-coding may also be done to make the quality of the playback better.

¤ Encoding and Trans-coding: Encoding is the process of converting an analog media (video) in to a digital one. By encoding, the enterprises are able to take the media in a compressed format and hence reducing the bandwidth. Such encoded digitized media can also be converted to other formats for further processing or compatibility. This is done by a process called trans-coding.

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