Voice and Video Conferencing Fundamentals

Here's a technical offering from Cisco that explains voice and video conferencing. Maybe its best aspect is that it summarises the dense, voluminous encoding standards, which are virtually unreadable in their original documentation. The book is directed towards a programmer. It explains the ideas used in the encoding algorithms for video compression. Very sophisticated and numerically intensive steps that squeeze out as much redundant information in consecutive frames as possible. That's just to encode and decode video. Then the book also goes on to the Realtime Transport Protocol and the Session Initiation Protocol. The basis for VoIP. Though perhaps surprisingly, VoIP doesn't seem to garner a mention. The book is useful, and not confined to Cisco products. The descriptions are germane to any industry products in this field. Given Cisco's leadership in Internet routing, it is commendable that it offers an authoritative text like this book.

Are you a network or system administrator? If you are, then this book is for you. Authors Scott Firestone, Thiya Ramalingam and Steve Fry, have done an outstanding job of writing a book for those that are involved in the design, development, deployment and support of audio and video conferencing products. Firestone, Ramalingam and Fry, begin by reviewing the elementary concepts of conferencing, describing the various types of conferences and the features found in each. Then, the authors review conferencing system design and the underlying components used in their construction. Next, they discuss the basics of video compression algorithms used by four major codecs: H.261, H.263, H.264 and MPEG-4 part 2. The authors also discuss the basics of Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) and Real-Time Transport Control Protocol and their usage in conferencing systems. They continue by discussing the fundamentals of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and its relevance to audio and video conferencing. Then, the authors provide a brief overview of the H.323 protocol, with an emphasis on conferencing systems. Next, they analyze the end-to-end data pipeline of a video conferencing system and discuss the process of achieving lip synchronization in an RTP-based video conferencing product. Finally, the authors go into depth on many aspects of video conferencing security, including encryption, authentication, attack prevention, firewall traversal, and network-level hardening. The goal of this most excellent book is to provide an understanding of different video conferencing deployment models, including centralized and distributed architectures, by using real-world examples. Perhaps more importantly, this book provides a comparison of the most widely used video codecs, in a concise reference format.