Each year, the Megaconference occurs as a result of a tremendous amount of volunteer effort and good will, with the goal of connecting people together everywhere on Earth where someone chooses to participate, in order to further the use of videoconferencing in education and research and to advance of the state of the art in videoconferencing technology.
Today, speakers from across the globe will share their latest real-world uses of H.323 videoconferencing, while using H.323 videoconferencing to do so.
Having reached its 6th edition, this is the largest live Internet videoconferencing event taking place.
Making use of some of the best technologies available, including the Internet2 backbone, the MegaConference is an event about people and the human side of connecting together rather than exclusively about the technologies and tools that make this possible.
The MegaConference it is also a showcase of interoperability between different technologies utilizing common international standards.
On top of traditional videoconferencing technologies provided by industry giants Radvision, Polycom, Tandberg and others, also this year soft-based videoconferencing endpoints are joining into the live event. While Microsoft NetMeeting is not supported anymore, a number of participating endpoints will be joining into the live MegaConference utilizing WaveThree Session technology (PC and Mac compatible), which supports the SIP interoperability protocol, along with a wide set of video (Wavelet, H.261, H.263) and audio codecs.
During the MegaConference official Roll Calls taking place at different times during the day, individual participants and groups will showcase unique 1-minute self-presentations utilizing many different approaches.
Coordinated by Bob Dixon at Ohio State University, the MegaConference is accessible as a streaming video to anyone who wants to have a peek at this one-day long online event.
No matter on what kind of computer you operate you can access the live videostream with Quicktime, Real Player and Windows Media Player too.
The MegaConference starts at 8am NY time, 1pm London today. No registration is required to attend.
Detailed MegaConference program - hour by hour
Up-to-date MegaConference Blog by Bob Dixon
(he doesn't call it blog, nor he knew what blogs were until we talked together - nonetheless his announcement page is a perfect example of an event blog)
Presentation abstracts
General access info to the streaming video feeds
Access to the recording of past events
Individual event access points for viewers:
Internet2 Commons
http://commonsvcg.oar.net/megaconference/index.php
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/ESnet: Berkeley, CA, USA
Quicktime or RealPlayer
Login: megacon Password: megacon
http://198.128.3.172/
or better yet this URL
University of Helsinki, IT Department
Quicktime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media
Password: test
Multicast MPEG2 transmission viewable with VideoLAN client.
Look for "UH Megaconference VI relay MPEG2" in the SAP directory
or enter this UDP multicast address: 233.6.205.132, port 4444.
CESNET (czech NREN): Prague, Czech Republic, EU
Windows Media IPv4, Windows Media IPv6
Note: You must have an H.263 video codec in your player,
which you can download from the Internet2 Commons Streaming Web page.
Download: http://commonsvcg.oar.net/util.php
http://server3.streaming.cesnet.cz/megaconference (IPv4)
http://server6.streaming.cesnet.cz/megaconference (IPv6)
Lakehead University: Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
Windows Media Player and Quicktime
http://mediastreamer1.lakeheadu.ca/megaconf
****Update****
You may find it difficult to connect to some of the above access points. You will receive errors and streams not accessible. I can confirm this to be happening also on my side.
The Lakeside University streams were all accessible though you may need to install a small piece of extra software and reboot your computer.
A minimum bandwidth of 384 Kbps is required to access any of the above.
Internet2 Commons has just activated its streaming feeds too and overall they seem to be the most reliable so far.
