Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

H.323 Videoconferencing from Mac OS X with oPhoneX

A long term dream is realized, and the solution is free open source software. Just amazing. The software product? oPhoneX!

For many years I have wanted to videoconference with the standard H.323 (IP) protocol from my Macintosh computer. About 3 years ago, I tried using the software available from OrangeMicro with their iBot firewire camera, that was “supposed” to connect with Windows-based computers running Netmeeting. Admittedly I did not spend hours and hours working to get the solution to work– as a Mac user, I typically expect things to “just work” relatively quickly– and I had not seen another software option until this week for doing H.323 videoconferencing on a Mac.

The iSight camera and Apple’s iChat AV software are AMAZING– hardware and software that are truly plug and play, as they should be for videoconferencing. The problem has been, however, that you could only iChat with other Mac users running iChat, it was not possible to videoconference with iChat from a Mac to a Windows user. I learned in February that the Video IM features in the latest AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) are published to support cross-platform video chat, between Mac users running iChat and Windows users running AOL IM. I have not tried this, however, and if if this works “as advertised” this still does not provide H.323 videoconferencing capability.

Enter my weblog and a thoughtful comment from Bethany Smith at North Carolina State University. Responding to my post about a recent videoconferencing article I wrote for Technology and Learning magazine, Bethany pointed out that at NC State they support both Mac and Windows users videoconferencing with H.323 compatible software: their support page for this is excellent. The Mac H.323 videoconferencing software they use and recommend is oPhoneX, available as a free download from Sourceforge. NC State’s how-to guide for configuring and using oPhoneX is also excellent.

Using oPhoneX, I have been able to successfully videoconference with audio and video, using Mac OS X and an iSight camera, to room-based Polycom iTV equipment! This is a very exciting development indeed– and you can’t beat the price for the software: free! Yeah for open source developers! 🙂

Since my IP address changes frequently even here at TTU when I use the wireless network, I will be setting up a free Dynamic DNS name for my computer (using DynDNS) as well as the freeware program DNSUpdate for Mac OS X. After doing this, I will be able to share an unchanging web domain address for my computer that others can use to videoconference directly with me via H.323, instead of trying to figure out (wherever I happen to be) what my current IP address is.

BTW, there are different ways to find out your IP address depending on what type of computer you are using: Mac, Windows or Linux, but by far this seems to be the easiest: just visit www.whatismyip.com. Again, a free resource. 🙂

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