XMeeting Readme

System Requirements
Contact
Manual
Localization
Credits
Release Notes for Release 0.1
Known Bugs

Thank you for downloading XMeeting!
In this document, you will find all information related to this particular release of XMeeting. For more information about the XMeeting project in general, project roadmap, planned releases or actual news, please visit the project's webpage found at http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/.

Currently, there is no XMeeting version available for Intel-Macs

While XMeeting offers better compatibility and video quality than ohphoneX ever did, it is too early to consider XMeeting a one-to-one replacement for ohphoneX. If you intend to use H.323 video conferencing in a productive environment, we recommend you to stay with ohphoneX.

System Requirements

Mac OS X 10.4 or newer with QuickTime 7 installed. (PPC)
Recommended: An QuickTime compatible USB or FireWire webcam (e.g. iSight)

An Universal Binary release is planned. We haven't been able to test on x86 machines yet. The code does compile fine, but networking application are in general highly exposed to endianess issues, so we expect having to fix some major problems first.

Contact

Any help or contribution to the XMeeting project is well-appreciated. Please feel free to contact us. If you have bug reports, feature requests or patches, please use the bug-tracking facilities at sourceforge.net. In addition, you can also use the xmeeting-application mailing list. The project's admin can be contacted by sending mail to hfriederich@users.sourceforge.net.

Manual

We are currently working on a manual for XMeeting. At current time, XMeeting ships without a manual.

Localization

While XMeeting is designed to be localizable, the GUI is still work-in-progress. Therefore, keeping all localizations up-to-date would require a huge amount of time and resources. That's why we don't consider XMeeting ready for localization yet. Please contact us if you want to provide a localization for your native language, so that we can inform you when we consider XMeeting ready for localization.

Credits

XMeeting release 0.1 by NET's XMeeting project team. The team consists of Hannes Friederich (software engineering), Thomas Rechsteiner (testing, gatekeeper & conferencing setup), Olivier Widmer (testing and user manual) and is led by Dr Thomas Piendl. The NET XMeeting contribution is completely funded by NET http://www.net.ethz.ch/, a part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich http://www.ethz.ch/.

The new Graphical User Interface (GUI) is contributed by SWITCH http://www.switch.ch by funding the work of Ivan Guajana (software engineering). SWITCH supports and fosters cross-platform video-conferencing and therefore decided to contribute to the XMeeting project by offering a new user interface.

The Screen Video input Module is contributed by Mark Fleming, Learning Technology Specialist at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada.

Release Notes for Release 0.1

This is the first "official" beta release of XMeeting which ships with the following features:

Support for the H.323 protocol. SIP support is planned.
A new implementation of the underlying XMeeting framework, redesigned from scratch. This framework builds upon the PWLib and OPAL libraries from the OpenH323 project
Support for QuickTime video codecs, improving the quality and bandwidth usage compared to ohphoneX.
Supported video codecs: H.264 (partially), H.263 and H.261. Sending H.264 will not work in most cases unless sending between two XMeeting clients. There exists an option "Enable H.264 Limited Mode" in preferences that allows to send H.264 with a limited bandwidth used and certain other restrictions. However, this mode is NOT standard compliant!
Supported audio codecs: G.711 uLaw and ALaw. More codecs will be added later
A completely redesigned Graphical User Interface (GUI) with support for FullScreen video, Picture-in-Picture (PiP) and many other useful features.
The concept of encapsulating relevant preferences in a super-set, called location. This makes it easy to adjust the application behaviour to your current location. (e.g. "Home" or "Office")
A new system for providing video input, using a modular interface. XMeeting ships with two modules, a Live Camera Module for QuickTime compatible webcams and a Screen Module for capturing and sending screen content.
A new Setup Assistant for first-time launch. The assistant can also be used for importing locations from existing files, intelligently asking the user for the missing information. This is the ideal solution for distributing XMeeting along with predefined preferences. Please contact Hannes Friederich if you plan to use this feature.

Known Bugs

On some older machines, video isn't displayed properly (or not at all). If you open the Tools Inspector, select "" and the video preview shows completely black, your machine is affected from this problem. Please contact Hannes Friederich by providing the model type of your computer and additional information such as graphics card, RAM etc.
In some rare cases, calling a remote party seems to take long time without showing any success.
After some calls, XMeeting is no longer registered at a gatekeeper, even if indicating so. Terminating XMeeting may take a long time in this case.
XMeeting may crash randomly and rarely when in a call. This is especially true when receiving H.264
When being in a call for a long time, the remote video may show a green screen instead of the remote video. Hangup and restart the call will help. Please contact Hannes Friederich if you experience this bug, providing which video codecs were used and how much time elapsed before this bug appeared.