How to use VCO with video relay on i711.com (or other) if you don't have a phone?

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you_rock

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I presently use i711.com from my computer for video relay. I am satisfied with their service.

However, I would like to be able to use their VCO. They require me to provide a phone number for them to call me first. This is unfortunate because I don't use the phone in the traditional sense. I want to operate everything from my computer.

Is this feasible?
 
Single and dual-line VCO

There are a number of VRS providers out there.

What you want to do is "single-line VCO". With this, your voice channel is setup at the same time as your video call and runs as a parallel RTP stream.

What i711.com (Purple) is asking you to do is "dual-line VCO", where another call is made to bridge your voice through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

All of the VRS providers support dual-line VCO.

Only a couple of VRS providers support single-line VCO, most do not. Here is a quick list of the VRS platforms out there today:

- ZVRS [zvrs.tv or (888)888-1116] (aka CSDVRS) - supports single-line VCO (marketed as VCOPlus)
- SNAP [snapvrs.tv] - supports single-line VCO
- URrelay [urrelay.tv] - ?
- LifeLinks [llvrs.tv] - ?
- AmericanVRS [americanvrs.tv] - ?
- Purple [i711.tv] (aka HOVRS) - no single-line VCO
- Sorenson [svrs.tv] - no single-line VCO

Believe it or not, all of the other VRS providers out there are on one of those VRS platforms. Ping the DNS name, and note the IP address. Note how there are only a handful of unique IP network addresses involved for all VRS providers. There are only a handful of actual VRS platforms available, that is why.

You can dial-around from your video client by dialing another provider's phonenumber or DNS name.

Many VRS videophones, like the VP200, either have horrible microphones or don't do audio at all, so single-line VCO calls are not possible from those.

I've heard that the Purple P3 doesn't support audio at all, so single-line VCO calls are probably not possible with it either (I'm on a Mac, so I've never tried myself).

The ZVRS Z4 and SprintVRS SV4 clients (Mirial based, run on both PC and Mac) support single-line VCO, as do their respective VRS services.

If you happen to be lucky enough to still have a Viable Vision account, that's an older Mirial client that should (might?) support single-line VCO as well.

There are other video clients out there. I recommend looking around and contacting that VRS provider's tech support to help you get going. That's what they are there for. :)

Cheers!
 
Someone told me to try skype for this. I've never used it myself but I'm just passing along the suggestion to look into.

Ron Jaxon
 
There are no VRS providers that work with Skype at this time.

Skype uses a rather cludged and obfuscated/"encrypted" jabber variant for signalling, as well as a P2P mesh for media proxying (you might be relaying your neighbor's video conversation through your internet connection).

The call signalling is entirely incompatible with SIP/H.323 video conferencing.

They only provide SIP _audio_ trunks at this time, and even the reverse engineered SIP audio gateways that exist today only do audio from the Skype network. No video.

Skype also historically uses the On2 VP7/VP8 codecs, though they've recently added H.264 support for TV video streaming. This means that the video codecs, up until recently, have also been entirely incompatible with SIP/H.323 video conferencing.

Primarily for these reasons, no VRS provider has attempted to work in a reverse engineered bot to act as a VRS gateway for Skype.

Anything his possible with enough time and money. To date, interoperating with Skype's choice of proprietary protocols and codecs has not been at the top of any VRS provider's list.
 
VRSEngineer said:
There are no VRS providers that work with Skype at this time.

Skype uses a rather cludged and obfuscated/"encrypted" jabber variant for signalling, as well as a P2P mesh for media proxying (you might be relaying your neighbor's video conversation through your internet connection).

The call signalling is entirely incompatible with SIP/H.323 video conferencing.

They only provide SIP _audio_ trunks at this time, and even the reverse engineered SIP audio gateways that exist today only do audio from the Skype network. No video.

Skype also historically uses the On2 VP7/VP8 codecs, though they've recently added H.264 support for TV video streaming. This means that the video codecs, up until recently, have also been entirely incompatible with SIP/H.323 video conferencing.

Primarily for these reasons, no VRS provider has attempted to work in a reverse engineered bot to act as a VRS gateway for Skype.

Anything his possible with enough time and money. To date, interoperating with Skype's choice of proprietary protocols and codecs has not been at the top of any VRS provider's list.
Click to expand...

It'll be VERY nice if one can reverse engineer one of VRS's software to work with Linux!!

Catty
 
Ekiga (previously GnomeMeeting) _could_ conceivably place calls, but it has serious interop bugs.

You can use "ohphone" but that's a bit of a commandline tool, though there are some Tk wrappers for it if you need a GUI.

The XMeeting (previously ohphoneX) stuff that runs on OS/X is just a fork of ohphone, and it works with VRS fairly well when configured properly (with some caveats).

Most of the opensource world is pretty anti-H.264, and very few are really happy working with H.263: the gnome empathy stuff, for example, is entirely Ogg/Vorbis.

Otherwise, you're stuck with something like a vmware wrapper to run a guest OS with some other softphone, which slows things down to the point where they are unusable.
 
VRSEngineer said:
Ekiga (previously GnomeMeeting) _could_ conceivably place calls, but it has serious interop bugs.

You can use "ohphone" but that's a bit of a commandline tool, though there are some Tk wrappers for it if you need a GUI.

The XMeeting (previously ohphoneX) stuff that runs on OS/X is just a fork of ohphone, and it works with VRS fairly well when configured properly (with some caveats).

Most of the opensource world is pretty anti-H.264, and very few are really happy working with H.263: the gnome empathy stuff, for example, is entirely Ogg/Vorbis.

Otherwise, you're stuck with something like a vmware wrapper to run a guest OS with some other softphone, which slows things down to the point where they are unusable.
Click to expand...

You're obviously an engineer, why not jump in and help Ekiga with their bugs? You would make a lot of Linux user's happy. :-D
 
Wirelessly posted

VRSEngineer said:
There are a number of VRS providers out there.

What you want to do is "single-line VCO". With this, your voice channel is setup at the same time as your video call and runs as a parallel RTP stream.

What i711.com (Purple) is asking you to do is "dual-line VCO", where another call is made to bridge your voice through the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

All of the VRS providers support dual-line VCO.

Only a couple of VRS providers support single-line VCO, most do not. Here is a quick list of the VRS platforms out there today:

- ZVRS [zvrs.tv or (888)888-1116] (aka CSDVRS) - supports single-line VCO (marketed as VCOPlus)
- SNAP [snapvrs.tv] - supports single-line VCO
- URrelay [urrelay.tv] - ?
- LifeLinks [llvrs.tv] - ?
- AmericanVRS [americanvrs.tv] - ?
- Purple [i711.tv] (aka HOVRS) - no single-line VCO
- Sorenson [svrs.tv] - no single-line VCO

Believe it or not, all of the other VRS providers out there are on one of those VRS platforms. Ping the DNS name, and note the IP address. Note how there are only a handful of unique IP network addresses involved for all VRS providers. There are only a handful of actual VRS platforms available, that is why.

You can dial-around from your video client by dialing another provider's phonenumber or DNS name.

Many VRS videophones, like the VP200, either have horrible microphones or don't do audio at all, so single-line VCO calls are not possible from those.

I've heard that the Purple P3 doesn't support audio at all, so single-line VCO calls are probably not possible with it either (I'm on a Mac, so I've never tried myself).

The ZVRS Z4 and SprintVRS SV4 clients (Mirial based, run on both PC and Mac) support single-line VCO, as do their respective VRS services.

If you happen to be lucky enough to still have a Viable Vision account, that's an older Mirial client that should (might?) support single-line VCO as well.

There are other video clients out there. I recommend looking around and contacting that VRS provider's tech support to help you get going. That's what they are there for. :)

Cheers!
Click to expand...

I know P3 would work with any webcam but what about MVP q Will it work same as Z-340 q
 
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