When people think about web or video conferencing, they think in terms of universal connectivity—that is, the ability to connect from anywhere to anywhere. And people also want to be able to include all kinds of users as well as applications in their discussions—ranging from the people in corporate headquarters who can gather in video conferencing rooms to those individuals using standard PC's from their workplace or even home office. But that’s just the sort of flexibility and affordability that has never been associated with traditional video conferencing.

Traditional video conferencing was designed to rely almost entirely on centralized Multipoint Control Units (MCUs), dedicated high-bandwidth lines, and special conferencing facilities. A very expensive investment that relies on a high level of tech support. Current web products, while free or low cost, have poor quality video, limits to multiple users, and can not share applications.

In order to make this vision of video conferencing a reality, a new methodology was required.  Ultimately, this vision was realized with the creation and adoption of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of the H.264 video coding standard. The Soltrite video conferencing solution is built on technology designed to take advantage of SVC.

The SVC Revolution

Scalable Video Coding is a disruptive force in video conference technology for two key reasons. First, the Soltrite encoding and decoding takes place on the user's PC rather than at the conference bridge. The network is therefore free to focus on what it was designed to do—route data. This means that the encoding and decoding are more efficient since the PC only has to worry about one participant rather than everyone in the conference, dramatically cutting down on delay.

Second, the transmitted data is split into two channels. The “high reliability” channel takes the key video frames and the audio. The “low reliability” channel takes the rest. This is the key to providing reliable and robust video conferencing. The Internet is not a perfect transmission medium; sometimes packets get lost, or arrive in the wrong order. Traditional video conferencing was not built with the Internet in mind, and has been adapted over time to try to cope with these new demands. SVC was built to work in harmony with the Internet, so when packet loss occurs, only packets from the low reliability channel are dropped—the user will notice a slight drop in quality but the call will continue and once the packet loss stops the quality will return to the higher levels.

*A USB headset or a USB Echo-cancelling speakerphone is required for Soltrite Video Conferencing Service.