Connect a Tandberg 1000 to a Mac using iChat

[Articus3625]

I am an intern at a non-profit organization in West Virginia. We have been using Tandbergs for our video conferencing needs between our 3 locations.

I have been assigned the task of incorporating several Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger, with firewire iSight cameras to the conferencing. I have yet to find a way to have the Tandberg and the Macs to connect.

If anyone could be of assistance, it would be greatly appreciated.

[CamSys]

From what I've read, there's no real way to use iChat. iChat doesn't support H.323.

You can always look into ohphone from http://www.openh323.org.

CamSys
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[machuky]

Hi,

just my two cents, although I'm no Mac specialist I have some enthusiast buddies working with MacOS, and from what I know, you can use Gnomemeeting on Mac with something called fink, and it is H323 compliant. However, it looks like you need some Linux/BSD compilation skills for this. A new software, Xmeeting, is still under developement but looks like it works. You can find some info here :
http://xmeeting.sourceforge.net/
And I know there are always ways to use BSD/linux apps on Mac, but it is often a tedious process.

Hope it helps, good luck to you on this and let us know how things going for you, it is quite interresting setup you have there...


machuky

[Sean Lessman]

I am an intern at a non-profit organization in West Virginia. We have been using Tandbergs for our video conferencing needs between our 3 locations.

I have been assigned the task of incorporating several Macs running OS X 10.4 Tiger, with firewire iSight cameras to the conferencing. I have yet to find a way to have the Tandberg and the Macs to connect.

If anyone could be of assistance, it would be greatly appreciated.
MAC uses a Mac-only (AOL now I think) SIP to do iChat. Its not compatible with TANDBERG.

Sean

[trapehzoid]

fink is just a package installation program.. nothing to do with the software itself.

The software you want to look into for OSX is OhPhoneX, its a H323 client.

[Entropy3XD]

There are probably some incompatibilities, and I don’t know where everything stands in development, but I know that Radvision was working on a SIP to H.323 gateway for the ViaIP400. I saw it in action a little over a year ago.



It may be a little off topic but today at a clients site we worked with Cisco to get their VT Advantage phones using SKINNY working with a Tandberg MCU and Polycom endpoints on the H.323 side. The VT Advantage sites used the Cisco Call Manager as a gateway. We also tested with a Cisco MCU on the H.323 side. It worked flawlessly.

[trapehzoid]

even having a SIP gateway will not make those clients compatible. Maybe you should say 'loosely' based on SIP :)

Good to hear the Cisco H323-Skinny functionality worked well. I've seen demos of skinny video using the gateway (the tandberg 1000) but not the VT Advantage. What do you think of those?

[Entropy3XD]

[QUOTE=Good to hear the Cisco H323-Skinny functionality worked well. I've seen demos of skinny video using the gateway (the tandberg 1000) but not the VT Advantage. What do you think of those?[/QUOTE]
The VT Advantage is really nothing more than a web cam attached to a PC. It uses a simple Logitech camera (complete with Cisco logo) attached to a PC via USB. Ethernet plugs into the phone, with another ethernet line coming from the phone to the PC. A Simple software package on the PC brings up video when a video call comes in. You use the phone for your audio. For $150 (US) it is a pretty good package, and the video was surprisingly crisp. The video received from the VTA was on a Polycom 512 attached to a 50" plasma, and the video received was impressive, even on the big screen. For a desktop user it is pretty good, but I like the 1000MXP more of course, especially since the addition of the SXGA input. Diagnostic tools on the VTA were not all that impressive, but I didn’t expect them to be.

The 150MXP has non-functioning buttons which seem to be for future Cisco compatibility. From the style of the device, I would not be surprised if I see a 150 with a Cisco logo on it one day.

[trapehzoid]

Did you see that show of 24? Cisco seems to be paying some serious 'product placement' money. They had a unit that looked like the tandberg unit with cisco labels all over it!

[Articus3625]

OhPhoneX connected the Tandberg to our test Mac, but there is a problem...

While the Mac is sending Audio and Video, it is only receiving audio from the Tandberg. The Tandberg, on the other hand is sending and receiving audio/video.

I have set OhPhoneX to receive video in the preferences but no connection to a video signal is shown in the Connections Stats.

Thanks for the help so far, and for any in the future!

[Kevin]

It may be a little off topic but today at a clients site we worked with Cisco to get their VT Advantage phones using SKINNY working with a Tandberg MCU and Polycom endpoints on the H.323 side. The VT Advantage sites used the Cisco Call Manager as a gateway. We also tested with a Cisco MCU on the H.323 side. It worked flawlessly.

(With this thread in mind) I did a demo at a customer today with Call Manager as a gateway, VTadvantage, Codian MCU and IPVCR, some Tandberg 990MXPs, a Polycom VSX7000, a Vcon VpointHD and OhPhoneX all comunicating together in the same conference. You can even use the numberpad on the Cisco IP phones to change layouts and move cameras when in Codian MCU call. OhPhoneX worked fine.

Isn't is great when standards really work. It would be great if iChat was really standards based as it does seem pretty slick.

Maybe this is for another thread but what are peoples records for real life situations with the largest amount of products from different manufacturers in the same conference?

Kevin

[trapehzoid]

OhPhoneX connected the Tandberg to our test Mac, but there is a problem...

While the Mac is sending Audio and Video, it is only receiving audio from the Tandberg. The Tandberg, on the other hand is sending and receiving audio/video.

I have set OhPhoneX to receive video in the preferences but no connection to a video signal is shown in the Connections Stats.

Thanks for the help so far, and for any in the future!

I don't have any direct experience with it.. but you should check what the tandberg is sending in its call status screen and see if its sending something that the ohphoneX client can recieve.

You aren't introducing something like NAT or a firewall in this test are you? start with a simple test with simple network.

You might also try disabling some of the call quality features on the tandberg to see if you find one that is confusing the software client

[power2learn]

Hi,

I'm new to the whole VC thing really - have only used tandbergs at the open university. Tried ophone to connect my mac to a tandberg 500 in a meeting room here on campus and had exactly the same problem - the video and audio went from the mac to the tandberg. The tandberg claimed to be sending audio back, but I couldn't hear anything. The tandberg said it wasn't sending video, and I couldn't see anyway of making it do so. (It seems to work perfectly on calls from other T units).

I thought maybe it was a network issue for us, but if it is happening for other folks, maybe it is a software issue with ophonex?

It would be great if this (or another software solution) could be made to work.