2017年统一通信买家指南

The continued evolution of unified communications (also known as unified communications and collaboration, or UCC) has relied on a number of key learnings from the videoconferencing, 互联网语音协议(VoIP), 流媒体产业. 毕竟, if the goal is to unify all voice- and video-based enterprise communications—from live conferences to searchable on-demand streams, delivered to any type of end-point device—there needs to be collaboration between vendors in each of the three industries.

This Buyers’ Guide attempts to provide insight into UCC trends and the impact that each may have on purchasing products and services that combine streaming with other forms of enterprise video. There’s another Buyers’ Guide in this year’s Industry 原始资料 that deals with 企业视频平台, and the two guides can be used hand-in-hand when shopping for enterprise streaming video solutions.

Let’s look briefly at how videoconferencing solutions are merging more tightly with streaming solutions.

只是另一个终点

One newer approach to merging streaming media and videoconferencing has been tried numerous times, 在很多方面, 在近20年的协作流媒体历史中.

The controller for multipoint videoconferences—the kind made by Cisco, 原尺寸的, 宝利通, 泰德, 又称vidyo，称为多点控制单元(MCU). 多个会议室连接到MCU, with each of these rooms or “end points” able to see the other rooms, 虽然不是在同一时间.

如果只有三到四个端点连接, 所产生的屏幕图像可以容纳所有的房间在一个平铺, 好莱坞广场格式. 否则, switching between rooms is often determined by the host of the event (known as “chair control”) or by an algorithm that tracks who is speaking and switching accordingly (known as “video follows audio” based on the fact that someone at a particular end-point room often needs to speak for 3–5 seconds before the video switches over to them).

The new-old idea is to add some form of streaming encoder or recorder to a multipoint video call, 哪个充当不可见的端点参与者, 记录多点通话. 由于H.323, the IP standard for videoconferencing, relies on a profile of the H.264编解码器, it’s 然后 easier to package up the multipoint recording to publish to an online video platform or even a learning management system (LMS) for education or enterprise.

声波铸造, a company that has two decades of experience with rich-media recording and tight integrations with various LMS offerings, has recently launched a version of this end-point recording solution that moves a step closer toward a holistic unified communications approach.

流式UCC图形

而不是仅仅记录多点H.323呼叫，声波铸造的Mediasite Join也记录了H.239个同步数据来自第二屏幕.

Most videoconferencing setups today have one screen to view participants and another to view the PowerPoint or webpages being shown by the call’s moderator. 这个双屏幕设置, based on an idea from PictureTel called People+Content back in 2000, 允许图形发送到一个屏幕，视频发送到另一个屏幕, rather than earlier solutions that used a video-based document camera or VGA-to-composite video converter. Prior to that, those of us in videoconferencing had to rely on something called T.120，这是微软网络会议的基础.

H.239 over the past 15-odd years have been how to capture the graphics in synch with the video without blowing the bandwidth budget and how to decide which end point gets to deliver the graphics channel to all the other end points.

第一个问题有一个实际的挑战, as unified communications relies on guaranteeing that both the talking-heads video and simultaneous graphics stay in sync during on-demand playback. 解决这个问题的一种方法是录制第二个流, 完全专用于图形通道, but that required a significant amount of bandwidth to record graphics, 其中大部分只是演示幻灯片, 或者静态图像, 这可能会持续几分钟.

好几年了, 然后, the industry had to rely on two different quality encodes: one for talking heads and a higher-quality one for graphics.

第二个问题已经在H中解决了.239通过一个不优雅的解决方案:用于多点会议, only one end point in the conference can send the additional graphics channel to all other end points. 另一方面, this second channel is essentially a broadcast (unidirectional video) stream rather than a collaborative (bidirectional video) stream. 这降低了端点处的计算复杂度, 因为他们只需要解码第二个信道.

The advent of high-definition (HD) cameras made this task a bit easier, since the resolution of both the graphics and an HD camera were about on par, but the impending advent of 4K presents a daunting task of sending two simultaneous 4K streams.

使UCC内容可搜索

Some solutions use a frame grabber to snag still images of the graphics, 试图降低整体带宽. This works, as long as there is no full-motion video being delivered on the H.239频道, so look for solutions that can differentiate between still images and full-motion video being delivered on the second video channel.

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