Subject: Connecting UNIX users to Cu-Seeme reflector

From: "Alan McCoy" <[email-masked]>
Date: 25 Apr 1997 13:54:48 GMT

Has anyone had any luck with setting up a CU-SeeMe reflector to allow UNIX
users to join a conference with PC and Mac users?  I assume that most of
the UNIX users will use VIT, VAT, and/or NV to connect.

Any configuration suggestions for this?
-- 
Alan McCoy
[email-masked]

---

From: "Alan J. Flavell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 1997 15:27:19 +0000

> the UNIX users will use VIT, VAT, and/or NV to connect.
                          ^^^

Did you mean vic?  I don't believe it supports this mode.

I've been involved in some work using the white pine reflector, not the
freeware one. I tried the freeware reflector a couple of years back: it
was said to work sort-of OK on some platforms, but it wasn't good on the
platforms that I had tried at that time. 

MBone users must run nv, in cuseeme compatibility mode, and if connecting
to the cuseeme reflector in unicast mode then they must transmit video in
order to register their presence to the reflector, and get the reflector
to send them anything.  (set bandwith to minimum if you don't actually
want to send video data to the reflector).  vat, on the other hand, sends
some kind of membership report, so it receives audio from the reflector
without any further formality. 

Most of the trials I've done have been operating the MBone apps in unicast
mode and connecting to the reflector explicitly.  In principle if you have
a multicast-capable reflector you should be able to transmit to a
multicast address i.e an MBone session. Note that these modes use the old
pre-RTPV2 transport formats, that are now deprecated on the MBone. 
Creating and advertising such a session via sdr would call for some
handcrafting of the sdr plugins.

You could email me off the list if you think (on the basis of what
I have said) that I can help you.

I realise that in theory nv is now obsolete, but as far as I know,
it's the only practical way of doing what we are discussing here,
so I'm still interested.