Abstract—Most modern science advances are done through
collaboration of groups from multiple academic and research institutions.
This paper explores some techniques used at Carnegie
Mellon University to facilitate communication between groups
through multimedia. The result consists in a system that can
do streaming and recording of high quality audio/video using
two high definition pan/tilt/zoom cameras, videoconferencing,
web control and scheduling of events, in-room touchscreen
control of the equipment, and surveillance of the conference
room, everything with minimum human intervention. The main
purpose of this research was to go beyond expensive commercial
solutions which have important limitations, and to build as much
as possible based on open source software and off-the-shelf
hardware. A modular software was developed to link together
the common hardware components with a commercial canned
solution offered by the multimedia vendors. The system presented
here were tested for about two years in a production environment
and proved to be stable and reliable.
Index Terms—multimedia, video conferencing, streaming, content
recording
I. INTRODUCTION