MERCI Deliverable D4

Project Number: 1007 ( RE)

Project Title: Multimedia European Research Conferencing Integration (MERCI)

Deliverable Type: (PU/LI/RP)^* RP

Deliverable Number: D4

Contractual Date of Delivery: 30 November 1997

Date of Interim Delivery:

Date of Final Delivery: March 1998

Title of Deliverable: MERCI Software Deliverable IV

Work-Packages contributing to the Deliverable: 3, 10

Nature of the Deliverable: (PR/RE/SP/TO/OT)^** TO

Author: Roy Bennett, Project Manager, MERCI

Those responsible for the deliverables are acknowledged in the relevant section of this document.

Abstract:

This is a Project deliverable. The tools we are delivering are freely available on World-Wide Web and ftp sites around the world. We have documented each of them under the headings Release Description, Systems Requirements List, Installation Guidelines, and the Web source for the software.

In this deliverable we offer the following upgraded versions of previously delivered tools:

FreePhone 3.5b3

MultiMON Beta 1.3

Rendez-Vous 1.0.2

Secure Conferencing User Agent (SCUA)

and the following new tools, demonstrated at the Annual Project review in 1997:

Mpoll Beta 1.2

TeleCanvas 1.0

Keyword list:

audio, Mbone, multicast, multimedia conferencing, network monitoring,RTP/2, shared workspace, video, voting

Software delivered
FreePhone 3.5 Beta 3

Acknowledgements

Sacha Fosse-Parisis is now the main man behind FreePhone. Andrés Vega-García wrote the core code of earlier versions of Free Phone up to 3.1b1, as part of his PhD work. Jean Bolot supervises the FreePhone effort.

Release Description

This release of Free Phone might not look very different from R3.2B1, but the internal structure of the code has been completely changed. We removed old C code and replaced it by C++ classes to facilitate the evolution of the code in the future. We also fixed assorted bugs. This version (under Windows with DirectX5.0) supports the 3D Sound and is able to run with several audio cards in the same PC.

Main features:

manages multiple unicast and multicast sessions. Thus, there is no need to have several instances of the tool running simultaneously.

implements RTP, the Real Time Transport Protocol .

includes a signalling protocol to contact remote parties. For example, use the "Call" button and type person@xxx.inria.fr to get in touch with "person" at INRIA. The signalling protocol also notifies of call acceptance or rejection.

includes support for sampling rates ranging from 8 to 48 kHz. High sampling rates such as 44 kHz and 48 kHz correspond to CD and DAT quality audio, respectively. Note that different participants in a multicast group might use different sampling rates in a transparent fashion.

includes a redundancy mechanism for packet reconstruction. The basis for using such a mechanism is described in [1]. The specific mechanism used in Free Phone has been shown to provide much increased audio quality especially when the packet loss rate is high (see [2] and listen to this ). The amount of redundancy included in each packet can be chosen in a manual, semi-automatic, or automatic fashion. In automatic mode, Free Phone automatically selects the amount of redundancy needed to keep the loss rate after reconstruction between some watermarks specified by the user [3].

supports the redundancy mechanism and the different sampling rates using special RTP payload types .

includes the usual assortment of codecs, including PCMU, VADPCM (ADPCM-DVI), ADPCM at 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2 bits, GSM, and LPC.

is compatible with other Mbone tools. It is of course compatible with RAT since both were developed within the MERCI project. It is compatible with vat when it does not use the redundancy or the high quality audio features. NeVoT will achieve compatibility with fphone soon.

uses Tcl/Tk8.0.

New features being added to Free Phone include 3D/spatial rendition of sound, a TCP-friendly rate control, and an "optimal" redundancy control mechanism.

Systems Requirements List

Versions are available, both standalone and dynamically linked, for Solaris 2.5, SunOS 4.1.3, Linux 2.0 and FreeBSD 2.2 (for which you need Voxware Audio Driver 3.5).

For Windows95, a dynamically linked version is available for which you need Tcl/Tk 8.0 for Windows and DirectX5.0.

Installation Guidelines

Binaries and a Getting started guide are supplied for all the platforms from the web source.

Web source

http://zenon.inria.fr/rodeo/fphone/obtain.html

MultiMON

Acknowledgements

MultiMON was developed at the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada, Ottawa. Contacts for this software are J L Robinson john@mars.dgrc.doc.ca and J A Stewart luigi@mars.dgrc.doc.ca who make the following acknowledgements for the various software components used by the package:

Tk/TCL - Copyright Sun Microsystems.

Tcpdump - AUTHORS Van Jacobson (van@ee.lbl.gov), Craig Leres (leres@ee.lbl.gov) and Steven McCanne (mccanne@ee.lbl.gov), all of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, University of California Berkeley, CA.

Stooop - Jean-Luc Fontaine (mailto:jfontain@pluton.experdata.fr)

xplot - Tim Shepard <shep@lcs.mit.edu>

tcl-dp - Brian C. Smith, Mike Perham, Tibor Janosi Department of Computer Science Cornell University http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/mperham/

Release Description

MultiMON is a monitor that collects, organises and displays all the IP multicast traffic that is detected at the location of the MultiMON Server.

While MultiMON is a general purpose multicast monitoring tool, it is intended in particular to monitor multicast traffic on local network segments and should assist a network administrator in managing the traffic on an Intranet.

MultiMON is built on a client/server basis which allows the data collectors (Servers) to be distant from the GUI front end displays (Clients).

Systems Requirements List

Multimon is written in tk/tcl, but needs tcpdump, xplot, the distributed processing additions and the object-oriented additions to tk/tcl.

Currently, we have it running on Sun workstations, but there is no reason to believe that it will not run on other platforms, (at least the client) including Windows 95 and NT.

The server needs: tk, tcl, tcpdump, tcl-dp, the client needs: tk, tcl, xplot, tcl-dp stooop

Versions needed:

tk: Version 4.2

tcl: Version 7.6

tcpdump: Version with multicast support

xplot: Version included

tcl-dp: Version included

stooop: Version included

Installation Guidelines

The Server, the Client, standalone programs, and the included packages are all under one directory structure. Certain files (scripts, etc) will need to be edited to include this correct path. This is outlined below.

The "root" directory has the following files in it:

MultiMON (The MultiMON Client)

MultiMON.server (the MultiMON Server)

README (small text file pointing to these pages)

README.MERCINARI (how to run the rtcp monitor standalone)

v2 (directory containing programs)

latest (symbolic link to v1)

packages (included packages)

To Set up the Server

1) install tk/tcl.

2) install tcl-dp. (see the "spam" utility in the tcl-dp dist.)

3) install tcpdump. Make it setuid if you expect to run multimon from an account other than root.

NOTE that in this version, tcpdump is modified to decrease (significantly) the compute time of the server. There is an image for Solaris in the distribution; it should install "out of the box". The modified tcpdump.c file is also included for those with other platforms.

4) check the paths in the file "MultiMON.server". These paths will need to be edited to reflect your environment.

To Set up the Client

1) install tk/tcl

2) install tcl-dp. (see the "spam" utility in the tcl-dp dist.)

3) install xplot (pre-compiled version for Solaris is included, and should run without any changes)

4) edit the paths in the file "MultiMON".

Web source

http://www.merci.crc.doc.ca/mbone/MultiMON/

Rendez-Vous 1.0.2

Acknowledgements

Rendez-Vous is a new Internet videoconferencing tool developed at INRIA by Frank Lyonnet. It is in a way the successor to the IVS tool developed some time ago by Thierry Turletti, which was one of the first Mbone tools available.

The audio component of Rendez-Vous is an integration of the application kernel of the FreePhone 3.5 audio tool developed also at INRIA by Sacha Fosse-Parisis and Andres Vega Garcia.

Release Description

Main features of Rendez-Vous:

RTP protocol support over multicast or unicast IP.

H261 video standard.

High quality PCMU, ADPCM, VADPCM (with HiFi support) and low bandwidth GSM and

LPC audio coding.

Mpeg 1/2 file reading / transcoding

Main advanced features of Rendez-Vous:

An integrated scheduler for video and audio flow management and processing (optimization of machine resources to maximise the suggestive quality rendered to the user).

A great flexibility for insertion of new protocols and coding schemes.

A flexible user interface based on the PAC Amodeus interactive system model with a custom C++ implementation.

Support for layered coding and transmission of video and audio flows.

Experimental multiresolution DCT codecs.

Great code portability with the use of single process design, ANSI standard, target system derivation of classes and the use of the PAC model. Rendez-Vous is portable without pain on every system provided an ANSI C and C++ compiler exists for it (gcc is fine).

Systems Requirements List

Supported systems are:

Sun Sparc Solaris machines, internal audio hardware, SunVideo and VigraPix grabbers

Sgi Irix machines, internal audio hardware, no video grabbing

x86 Linux machines, VoxWare audio by Sacha Fosse-Parisis, no video grabbing

x86 FreeBSD machines, VoxWare audio by Sacha Fosse-Parisis, no video grabbing

Dec OSF1 machines, no audio, no video grabbing

Windows 95 machines, DirectX 5.0 audio, VideoForWindows (QuickCam only) and Matrox Meteor grabbing. Windows NT 4 users have to wait for offical support for DirectX 5.0 in NT4.

Installation Guidelines

Unix users

Edit the ivstng.sh file in order to match the place where you want to put the lib/ library (default is ./lib).

Execute the ivstng.sh script with the following syntax :

ivstng.sh [(audio addr) (audio port) (video addr) (video port) [(ttl)]]

Default parameters are 224.2.224.2 2242 224.2.224.4 2244 16.

Windows users

You need to install [incr Tcl] on your system in order to use Rendez-Vous. You can find [Incr Tcl] binary distribution at httt://www.tcltk.com/itcl .
You also need DirectX 5.0 for the audio to work. If you are a Windows 95 user you will have to get DirectX 5.0 pack from Microsoft's site. If you have Windows 98 or Windows NT 5, DirectX 5.0 is included in the system. If you have NT 4, please wait for official DirectX 5.0 support from Microsoft.

Web source

http://www.inria.fr/rodeo/rv/

The Secure Conferencing User Agent (SCUA)

Acknowledgements

The software was developed by Lan Wang lan.wang@gmd.de, Anne Jaegemann jaegemann@gmd.de and Elfriede Hinsch hinsch@gmd.de.

Release Description

SCUA is based on the MIME standard and has the following features:

Exchange of encrypted messages between participants who are strongly authenticated by their certified public/ private RSA key pairs. There are two realisations for authentication, one by SmartCard and one by software only. The security infrastructure is based on SECUDE, a software package developed by GMD.

Mail encryption has been upgraded from being based solely on PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail, RFC 1113-1115) to include the more recent standards S/MIME and PGP.

Easy inclusion of specific conference data, such as conference name, tools used, multicast addresses etc.

Easy joining conference by a single click directly from the E-mail.

Reminding call (tone) for a user, when the starting time of a conference has come.

Cross-platform support and interoperability with common mail tools are an objective.

Systems Requirements List

The system is available for Unix machines running Solaris.

Installation Guidelines

Full instructions are given in the README file which is included with the release.

Changes have to be made to an installation script and the library libsecude.so for Solaris2.5 has to be retrieved.

At initial use, an installation window is opened and various defaults have to be changed.

Web source

http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/~jaegeman/scuae.html

MPoll Beta 1.2

Acknowledgements

MPoll was developed by Andrew Patrick at the Communications Research Centre (CRC) in Ottawa, Canada, as part of the MERCI project on Collaborative Work Tools.

Release Description

MPoll is a real-time opinion polling and rating collection tool that uses multicasting to distribute questions and responses to all multicast session participants.

MPoll was developed with the following uses in mind:

collecting quality ratings during multicast sessions

collecting opinions and votes during multicast collaborative work sessions

collecting opinions on general topics or current events

Systems Requirements List

Currently, binary distributions of MPoll are available for:

Solaris 2.5

SunOS 4.1.4

Win32 (Windows 95 & NT)

SGI IRIX 6.4

Installation Guidelines

The MPoll binary file is a stand-alone C program that does not require any extra libraries in order to run. Simply copy the MPoll program to a directory that is in your path.

WIN32 Systems

the WIN32 "exe" file is a self-extracting archive that you can run.

the InstallShield should install all the program components and DLLs that are needed to run MPoll

MPoll likes to have a HOME environment variable set. If MPoll complains about problems opening a datafile for writing, make sure you have a line like the following in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, and then reboot...

set HOME=C:\temp

HOME can be set to any directory you want. MPoll uses this directory to store a cache file ".mpoll.cache" and any results files that you save.

MPoll must be run with command line options that are passed from the SDR program or entered manually. As such, simply running MPoll from the Start Menu or the Explorer will likely fail. There is a debugging option enabled by running "mpoll -D" which defines some default parameters, so you may want to edit the shortcut properties in the Start Menu directory to use this option.

you should be able to use UnInstall from the Control Panel if you ever want to remove MPoll.

Web source

http://www.merci.crc.doc.ca/mbone/mpoll/

TeleCanvas

Acknowledgements

This software was developed by Andreas Rozek of the Communication Systems and BelWü Development organisation of the Stuttgart University Computer Center.

Release Description

TeleCanvas is the preliminary version of a platform-independent shared whiteboard TeleDraw – entirely written in Java. Problems with Java and protocol development on different machines lead to the development of a subset of the original design features of TeleDraw being implemented as TeleCanvas.

Features:

unlimited undo/redo of user actions

a session participant may even undo the operations of other participants

printer support

every single page of a drawing may be printed - printing of a whole document is foreseen for the future

bitmap reuse.

if a bitmap appears to be used several times (such as the background of a drawing page) it is stored (and sent across the network) only once, thus saving memory and network resources.

prepared for use as web applet

the program itself may also be run as a web applet - the author is currently developing a "proxy agent" that allows such an applet to participate in a drawing session.

Systems Requirements List

TeleCanvas run-time requirements are a Java 1.1 VM (either as part of a complete SDK or as part of the (smaller) runtime-environment) in order to execute the program. Get the latest version (which is 1.1.2 for Windows 95/NT and Solaris) as earlier releases tend to have lots of bugs!

The installation will require less than 500kB of disk space (mainly for a single Java archive file). During execution, TeleCanvas will need approx. 1MB of RAM plus memory for all the graphical objects and bitmaps used in drawings.

TeleCanvas has been tested on PCs running Windows 95. Tests on the following platforms will be done soon:

Sun SPARCstation running Solaris 5.4

SGI Workstation running IRIX 6.2

HP Workstation running HP/UX 10

PC running Linux

Installation Guidelines

TeleCanvas installation is pretty simple. First of all, make sure, that you have already installed the latest version of a Java VM (see xxx for distributions for Windows 95/NT and Solaris). Then download the following files:

TeleCanvas.jar - this is the main distribution

TeleCanvas.bat - Windows 95/NT only: this file simplifies program invocation

TeleCanvas.ico - Windows 95/NT only: use this icon to start TeleCanvas from your desktop

TeleCanvas - UNIX platforms only: this file simplifies program invocation

TeleCanvas.tdf - a TeleCanvas drawing file containing a brief tutorial

Transfer these files into a directory of your choice (e.g., "c:\Program Files\TeleCanvas" for a Windows 95/NT system) and proceed as explained below:

Windows 95/NT

Under Windows 95/NT, there are now a number of ways to proceed:

include the TeleCanvas installation directory in your command path and start the whiteboard from the shell using the batch file TeleCanvas.bat

on your desktop, create a link for file javaw.exe (which came with your Java distribution) with the following characteristics:

Destination: <Java Installation Directory>javaw.exe TeleCanvas

Working Directory: <TeleCanvas Installation Directory>

Icon: <TeleCanvas Installation Directory>TeleCanvas.ico

Note: don't create a link for TeleCanvas.bat or even TeleCanvas.jar!

You may now start TeleCanvas with a double-click on the TeleCanvas icon on your desktop

start TeleCanvas manually using the following command

javaw -classpath "TeleCanvas.jar;%ClassPath%" TeleCanvas

(javaw runs TeleCanvas without opening a shell before. You may, however, also use java instead in order to see potential error messages).

UNIX platforms

UNIX users should proceed as follows:

make sure that the file TeleCanvas is executable.

include the TeleCanvas installation directory in your command path and start the whiteboard from the shell using the command TeleCanvas

alternatively, you may start TeleCanvas manually using the following command

java -classpath "TeleCanvas.jar;$CLASSPATH" TeleCanvas

Web source

http://www-ks.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/PROJ/MERCI/TeleDraw/TeleCanvas.html