What's new with ConferenceXP 5
From UW Center for Collaborative Technologies Wiki
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What's new in ConferenceXP 5.1
This release combines a set of relatively minor features and bug fixes, including:
- Added support for DV audio sources.
- Diagnostic service logging was added to record connectivity history.
- Audio codec has been added to the client setup. Previously this required extra installation steps for Windows 7, Vista and Windows Server 2008 users.
- The reflector service can now run on the same system with client or archive service.
- Source updated to Visual Studio 2008.
- Fixed an Archive Service bug that sometimes caused a participant to be skipped from the archive.
- Presentation capability: added "Save as Image" menu command.
- Update Archive Service Setup to work better with SQL Server 2008.
- Added app.config configuration support for screen streaming frame rate and bit rate.
- Repaired an unhandled exception that occurred after launching the client on a system with no network adapters.
- Added more compressed audio formats to the audio configuration.
- Fixed a locking bug that occasionally caused the Reflector Service to fail.
- Fixed a reflector service bug that caused the reflector to not work until one minute after a client changed from multicast to unicast.
- Fixed a bug in the Presentation capability which caused some Office 2007 PowerPoint slides to display with black on the bottom and right.
- Added support for venue passwords to the CXP Client command-line mode.
- Tested against April 2009 Windows 7 RC. Repaired and documented a number of minor setup issues.
Known Issues
- When using uncompressed DV audio in a conference with 5.0 clients, the 5.0 nodes may see an assertion failure when the 5.1 client starts sending. The workarounds are:
- Click "Ignore". The conference will still work.
- Update all clients to 5.1 to avoid the error.
- You can install 5.1 side-by-side with 5.0, but if you uninstall one of them, you will need to re-install the other to make it work again.
What's new in ConferenceXP 5.0
- Diagnostics: The diagnostic service provides visibility into network-level statistics. The various statistics -- include group membership, transmission rates, and loss rates -- are displayed in an ASP.NET web page. In addition, feedback is incorporated into the ConferenceXP Client UI using tool tips and participant icon decorations.
- Security: Two security modes have been added:
- Weak: A password is required to access the mapping from venue name to multicast address. This mode is intended to prevent accidental access.
- Strong: The Password is hashed into a symmetric encryption key, and all stream data is encrypted with the key.
- NAT-friendly Reflector: The 5.0 Reflector supports multiple clients behind a single NAT device. Improved JOIN protocol removes assumptions about which ports will be used.
- Multi-Reflector: Multiple reflectors can be configured to work together to improve scaling for large numbers of unicast clients.
- High Quality Audio: DirectShow buffering modifications permit PCM uncompressed mono and stereo audio. Higher quality compressed formats have also been added.
- Audio/Video synchronization: Using the DirectShow buffering parameters, it is possible to synchronize the audio and video streams fairly accurately.
In addition, the 5.0 release will attempt to be somewhat "future-proof", in that future additions (network heterogeneity support, for example) do not require simultaneous upgrades from all clients.
Download
Downloads are available at http://cct.cs.washington.edu/downloads/CXP/.
