Operators and service providers are moving towards providing video conferencing services to the mass market, over the Web and to any type of client: mobile phone, laptop with a soft video client, or high-end desktop phone.
Equipment manufacturers are facing new and exciting challenges. Some of these challenges were not apparent in the traditional room-to-room video conferencing systems.
The main challenges facing equipment manufacturers in the video conferencing segment include:
- Bridging between various types of endpoints (soft clients, desktop units, mobile phones, MS Messenger, Skype, etc.) with diverse codecs and resolutions -
- Simultaneous video resolutions from SQCIF to VGA/D1 in the same conference
- Resizing from any device to any device
- Supporting various transport layers (RTP, 3G-324M) -
- 3G phones and fixed units (RTP) connected to the same bridge
- Split screens, multiple layouts in the same conference -
- Different participants will view different layouts in the same conference
- Layouts change based on dominant speaker change
- Rich layout support
- Backgrounds and foregrounds
- Drawing lines
- Scrolling text overlays for participant identification
- Large numbers of participants per conference - Decoding for dozens of video sources implemented using a distributed architecture, on multiple DSPs with high speed inter-DSP links to transfer uncompressed video between them
The SURF Engine overcomes all of the above challenges and more. The SURF Engine is the ideal platform for OEMs developing video conferencing.
