How Video Conferencing Works - Multimedia, Interactive Communication Across the Miles

You may think you understand video conferencing pretty well until someone who isn't at all familiar with it approaches you for a simple definition. When they ask, "What exactly is video conferencing?" You could suddenly realisiere you are at a loss for words. The simplest definition of how video conferencing works is from the integration of video, audio and peripherals to enable two or more people to communicate simultaneously over some telecommunications lines. In other words, you are transmitting synchronisiere images and verbal communications between two or more locations instead of them being in the same area. How video conferencing works is a little bit harder to explain than answering the question, "What is video conferencing?" Millions of people use video conferencing every day around the globe, but very few people know how the technical aspects of the process work. The key ingredients of successful video conferencing are video cameras, microphones, appropriate computer software and computer equipment and peripherals that will integrate with the transmission lines to relay the information. The analogue data recorded by the microphones and cameras is broken down into discrete units, translating it to ones and zeros.

The theory's the same, the transmission has changed In the earlier days of video conferencing, T1, ATM and ISDN lines were used almost exclusively but were only practical for room-based video conferencing systems. These dedicated lines were expensive, and only significant corporations tended to have the facilities and money to invest in this type of set-up. As the Internet became more a part of the everyday lives of all businesses, but it changed how video conferencing was conducted. The TCP/IP connections of the Internet are much less expensive and can carry vast quantities of information, including video packets for conferencing, relatively quickly. Because of this, video conferencing has become much more prevalent in small businesses and in desktop packages that can be set up with applications for computer-to-computer networking.

Compression makes video transmission practical The problem that arises when you convert analogue to digital for transmission is the loss of clarity in a picture. Analogue signals are a constant wave of amplitudes and frequencies showing shades and ranges of colour as well as depth and brightness. When you convert to digital, which can be strictly 0's and 1's, you then have to develop a grid to represent values, intensities and saturation of different colour values so the image can be interpreted and reformed in the receiving end. This huge amount of digital information requires huge bandwidth and means that the time it would take to transmit video images will be impractical for most applications. That's where compression is crucial. When determining how video conferencing works, one of the main elements is the compression ratio.