|
iVisit works well with your other network traffic:
iVisit is designed to be highly sensitive to the impact it may
have on the other users and applications sharing the network.
Unlike other real time audio/video applications that may blast
away at whatever data rate you select, iVisit continually monitors
network performance, and adjusts it's transmission rate accordingly.
This
focus on being a good network citizen comes partly from the experience
of iVisit developers in the early 90's, when a single
user running a poorly configured application could saturate the
entire link between Europe and the US, and there was discussion
of banning this type of application entirely.
Architecture enhances
multi-party capability:
The power of iVisit's network friendly, peer-to-peer
architecture becomes apparent when you are receiving, say,
5 audio/video streams from 5 independent sources. Those streams
must settle on some fair
sharing of the available bandwidth. Rather than developing
explicit control protocols by which these streams might notify
each other
and negotiate appropriate rates, iVisit streams competing for
bandwidth become aware of each other in exactly the same way
they become
aware of other network traffic: by colliding in the network
and responding accordingly. Appropriate rate adjustments reduce
iVisit
packet loss, allowing for a higher degree of data compression.
This improves the multi party communication
experience. As an important
side effect, it allows iVisit streams to coexist more efficiently
with other network traffic.
Although you may not plan to videoconference
while downloading large files, iVisit is a more dependable tool
since it enables
you take a video call when you're using the network for something
else.
This is not an easy problem to solve, and explains why, after
many years, iVisit remains the only peer-to-peer multi-party videoconferencing
application that actually works in a wide range of real world conditions.
As
a simple experiment for comparison, try simultaneously viewing
5 streaming video pages on the www. Even though each of these are
coming from powerful servers on high bandwidth connections, some
of them will stutter and freeze. Now call 5 friends (or strangers
in the iVisit public directory) and see that even though iVisit
streams typically originate from desktop machines on the edge of
the network, the video in all of the windows is smooth and clear.
iVisit
needs time to optimize for your network conditions:
Note, however, that iVisit's approach is not optimized for
demo environments. E.g., you may find the video frame rate
starts off
slowly even on a LAN, and there is no control where you can "dial
up" the bandwidth to whatever you choose. Give iVisit
a little time (up to 60 seconds) for smart streaming to automatically
optimize bandwidth for
your
system for the best experience. |