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Clicking the Add New button allows you to create a conference, much as you would using Phone Dialer. Note that while the tool allows you to create, modify, and delete conferences, you cannot join conferences using the tool itself. If you use only the basic conference property fields, then a conference is created with the same default settings as a conference created by Phone Dialer. However, clicking the Adv. Options button allows access to more detailed conference properties. Of these properties, the audio and video codec selections are the most interesting to power users.
The default audio codec for multicast conferences is the 64 kbps ITU G.711 PCM codec. Conferences on bandwidth-constrained networks (for example, conferences with participants connected via analog modems) may benefit from selecting a lower bandwidth codec. Besides the G.711 codec, the 13 kbps GSM 06.10 codec is also supported for multicast conferencing. Using the GSM codec will result in significantly lower audio bandwidth consumption, but with a corresponding reduction in sound quality and increased latency.
Note that the actual network traffic observed will be somewhat higher than the codec data rates due to packetization overhead. Also note that although other codecs are listed as options in the configuration menu, only G.711 and GSM are supported for multicast conferencing at this time. Two variants of the G.711 codec can be chosen; they are functionally identical, but G.711u is used by default.
The default video codec for multicast conferences is the ITU H.263 codec. The conference management tool also allows the creation of conferences specifying use of the ITU H.261 codec, however H.263 has both lower bandwidth consumption and superior quality than H.261. For this reason, use of the H.261 codec is not recommended unless required for compatibility with non-Microsoft clients.
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