Confcntlr Summary




As part of the Spectro-Microscopy Collaboratory at the Advanced Light Source project, I have designed and developed a conference controller, confcntlr, to allow local and remote control of the videoconferencing tools vic and vat.

confcntlr is intended for easier access to, control of, and coordination of a videoconference between remote sites. When running on the machines participating in a conference session, users can launch, control, and stop the video and audio portions.

confcntlr consists of a graphic user interface that lets the user set the parameters necessary to run the video and audio portions of a conference (e.g., bandwidth, frame rate, format, device, and time-to-live). Default values for each setting are displayed. The user may change any or all of these values to run a conference session.

A host running confcntlr can launch one or two video programs and one audio program locally or from a remote site. The user has the option of allowing or not allowing remote sites to control execution of the videoconferences on its local machine. If a conference session should not be started or stopped on one host by another (remote) host, the user can turn off the remote control feature. Current work includes porting to Windows. In the future, I hope to add functionality such as floor control, a session invitation component, and conference announcement capability.