InPerson(1)
inperson - InPerson desktop conferencing for SGI workstations
As shipped in IRIX 6.5.5. Unchanged since IRIX 6.5.
NAME inperson - InPerson desktop conferencing for SGI workstations DESCRIPTION InPersonTM is a multimedia desktop conferencing tool for SGI workstations such as the Indy, Indigo and Indigo2. Each conference includes audio and either video or a static image of the participant. Use of shared whiteboard and shared shelf is optional on a per-conference basis. Other SGI systems that lack audio and/or video hardware can still use the shared whiteboard. You can place a conference on hold, or can look and listen to a conference without transmitting any audio and video. This allows you to simultaneously work on urgent projects while monitoring the progress of a conference. This also allows you to hold an impromptu private conversation in your office without disturbing the ongoing conference. Each conference can have 2 to 8 participants when using Indy R4400SC models. Due to the use of multicasting, total network bandwidth usage scales linearly with the number of participants. The InPerson product consists of several programs: the phone, the conference view, and the whiteboard. The inperson program is the phone tool that you see on your desktop. The view program opens the main conference window. It manages all audio and video actions, the shared shelf, and the whiteboard. The whiteboard program is opened by the view when a user asks to open it. These two programs are started on behalf of the user by inperson. USAGE Please see the on-line InPerson User's Guide and the InPerson Setup and Administration Guide for detailed instructions on the use of this product. What follows is a brief summary. Placing and Receiving Calls To place or receive calls, you must run the inperson program. To run inperson, double-click its icon from the Icon Catalog's Collaboration page or type in a shell: % inperson When you run inperson, the image of an old-fashioned telephone appears on your desktop. The phone rings and flashes when someone is calling you. To answer a call, place the cursor over the phone; then click the left mouse button. To make a call, drag group or user icons over the phone image and release the mouse button. Participating in a Conference The conferencing window appears when you participate in a call. By default, it displays video of each person participating in the conference. Participant on systems that do not supports video are represented by a static image. See "Faces Database" section below to learn how to select a static image. The conferencing window can expand to show two other regions - the whiteboard and the shelf. To open the whiteboard, choose "Open whiteboard" from the Call menu. To open the shelf, choose "Open shelf" from the Call menu. About the Whiteboard The whiteboard is similar to the whiteboard or chalkboard you might find in a conference room. Each person in the conference has a unique marker that she or he can use to sketch or write notes on the board. People can also take screen and video snapshots and place them on the board. You can bring in 3D Inventor models, text and RGB image files from the Import menu, too. You can save your work for a later conference, or print it to get a hard copy. When placing images and 3D, you can stretch their size by clicking and dragging the mouse. Then, subsequently move any object by clicking on it and dragging. You can also `lasso' objects with the selection tool. When a 3D object is selected, scale and rotation handles show up. The corner squares allow you to uniformly scale the object, while the round rotation knobs allow you to rotate it. Use the shift key to get fixed rotation about an axis. The toolbar along the left edge of the whiteboard page has tools for drawing, typing, taking snapshots, selecting colors, text styles, and line styles, and adding new pages. If you wave your cursor over an object on the whiteboard, the text under the person's video image will highlight, indicating who drew it. About the Shelf The shelf is similar to the shelves that are used within the IRIX Interactive Desktop(TM) user environment. Files placed on the shelf are instantly accessible to all persons in the conference. You can bring the file to the local file system by clicking on and dragging the icon from the shelf to an fm (1) view of one of the local directories. Dragging the icon to the desktop puts only a link to the file on the desktop. The actual file may not be accessible later so if you want to save the file, drag the file icon to a local directory. You can double-click over an icon on the shelf to open it, as with any IRIX Interactive Desktop icon. If the icon is a folder, a directory view is launched for that folder. For any other category of icon you may be notified that InPerson does not know how to run that application shared between the conference participants and asked if you want to run it standalone. When InPerson is unable to access a file via NFS, it makes a local temporary copy of the file in a shadow directory so as to preserve all of the file operation semantics of IRIX Interactive Desktop icons. All temporary copies and the shadow directory are removed at the end of a call. The location of the shadow directory is controlled by an X resource (see below) and by the INBOX_PATH environment variable. If the environment variable INBOX_PATH is set to a directory path, InPerson uses that directory as the shadow directory but won't delete files from it. When a file is dropped on the shelf by another person in the conference, InPerson will check to see if that file has been transfered in advance by looking for a file of the same name in the INBOX directory. If so, then the file is referenced on the shared shelf immediately. Files copied into the INBOX directory (before or during a conference) will not be removed. This is the responsibility of the user. The shelf will only allow you to drop files which are local to your own system or are accessible to you via NFS. CUSTOMIZATION There are two control panels that let you set preferences to customize the behavior of the phone and of a running conference. You can also save the preferences as the default for future calls into the InPerson file in the the $HOME/.desktop-`hostname` directory. To access the phone's control panels, place the cursor over the phone, and then press the right mouse button to bring the menu. Choose "Ring control panel..." from the menu to change the incoming and outgoing ringing sounds. Chose "Call preferences panel..." to change video and network parameters and is described below. On each panel, the "Save" button saves the preferences into the InPerson file. The "OK" button applies the preferences to future incoming and outgoing calls but not the current call. The InPerson Call window also provides a control panel under the Tools menu that you can use to change the characteristics of the call in progress. The Call control panel, which is also accessible from the phone, has two sections. The Video Controls lets you change the size of the video images that are shown in the participant display area. The Vanity View buttons controls whether images from your camera are shown in the participant display area and whether the view is shown as other see it or mirrored. The Call Controls section controls outgoing video, compression and network parameters. if the Outgoing Video button is set to "Live", InPerson will will capture and transmit video if video hardware is available. If set to "Static Image", InPerson will always use a static image in place of video. The most common reason to change this setting to "Static Image" is to decrease the network bandwidth required for a call. InPerson automatically choses the appropriate video and audio compression schemes based on network bandwidth and the user's performance preference. The control panel lets you select the following information: o performance preference: In the presence of network congestion, InPerson can prefer video quality (and degrade frame rate) or prefer frame rate (and degrade video quality). o network bandwidth type: ISDN basic rate, T1/E1, LAN, (e.g., Ethernet), high-speed LANs (e.g., FDDI/CDDI, ATM). o finer control bandwidth slider: it lets you select the bandwidth target within the bandwidth range specified by the network type. For example, if you select the LAN network type, the bandwidth range is 0-5000 kbps. You can move the slider to use more or less bandwidth. InPerson then choses a video compression scheme that meets that target. For a given bandwidth, two compression schemes might be possible: one has a better image quality but a slower update(frame) rate, while the other has a faster frame rate but lesser image quality. The Performance Preferences button lets you choose which characteristic is more important. Resources There are some additional preferences that control the behavior of InPerson that are not on the control panels. Advanced users can change these resources by editing the InPerson user configuration file. The default X11 resources file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/InPerson contains a few resources that can be customized at the beginning of the file. You can edit this file as root to make changes for all users on the system. If you want your private customizations, copy the file to $HOME/.desktop-`hostname`/InPerson, then following the instructions at the beginning of the file. InPerson*facesPath (Faces database path) This resource controls which directories InPerson searches when looking for static images of user's faces. InPerson always checks $HOME/.icons/login.icon first, and then for each directory specified in the faces path, looks in <dir>/$USERNAME. Default value is "/usr/local/lib/faces:/usr/lib/faces". See the section below, "Faces Database", on adding a face file. InPerson*defaultFace (Default face image) This resource controls what face image is displayed if the user does not have an entry in the faces database. Default is "inperson". InPerson*participantBox.initialPlacement (Participant Layout) This resource controls whether the images of participants in the conference are placed horizontally or vertically in the InPerson Call window. Possible values are "VERTICAL" and "HORIZONTAL". Default is "VERTICAL". InPerson*shelf.shadowDir (Location of directory for shadowing the shelf) This resource controls what directory InPerson will use when it needs to make copies of files that are to appear on the shelf. The default value is "$HOME/.InPerson.shelf". InPerson appends "." and six more characters to this name to make a unique name for each call. This resource is overridden by the INBOX_PATH environment variable (see above). InPerson*shelf.xferTimeMsgThreshold (Threshold for transfer time notice) When you drop files on the shelf, it calculates the time to transfer the files to the other participants based on the current audio and video bandwidths. If the transfer time exceeds this threshold, the shelf will display a dialog box with the time and a choice to continue or cancel the transfer. The default value is 60 seconds. Set the resource to 0 to disable the calculation and the dialog box. InPerson*videoDevice (Video device name) For Indy systems that have the built-in VINO video hardware and the optional IndyVideo board, this resource lets select which one to use. The default is "vino". InPerson*keyFrameInterval (Video key frame interval) This resource controls how often a complete video frame is sent. Normally, HDCC compression just sends the portion of the video frame that changed. Periodically, HDCC sends out the complete video frame, regardless of whether or not it is changed, If a network packet containing compressed video is lost, that portion of the image will not be updated until it changes again, or until the next key frame is sent. Default value is 15 seconds; a useful range is 10-600 seconds with 0 to disable it. Most common reason to decrease this resource from the default value is to improve image quality on a network with a high packet loss rate. Most common reason to increase this resource from the default value is to decrease the network bandwidth required for video. InPerson*videoRate (Video frame rate) Controls the maximum frame rate for capturing video when using LANs or slower networks. The default is 15 frames per second. InPerson*videoRateHSLAN (Video frame rate for high-speed LAN) InPerson can send uncompressed video at 30 frames per second only if your machine is attached to a high-speed LAN such as FDDI or ATM. You must configure the networkMTU resource as described above and select the "Hi-speed LAN and "Optimize Frame Rate" buttons in the Call preferences Panel to enable this feature. The default value is 30 frames per second. InPerson*audioInputSource (Audio source) This resource sets the audio input source to the microphone ("mic"), line-in ("line") or the current apanel(1) setting ("default"). If not specified, the input source is set to the microphone. The call saves the current apanel(1) value in your resource file when the call exits. InPerson*audioLeftAtten (Audio input levels) and InPerson*audioRightAtten. These resources set the initial audio input level to the specified values. The range is 255 (soft) to 0 (loud). The call saves the current apanel(1) values in your resource file when the call exits. InPerson*audioAutoRateConversion (Audio sample rate conversion) This resource enables or disables automatic sample rate conversion when playing audio from the conference. For example, if you CDman running, and this resource is True, the call will produce audio at the same sampling rate used by CDman. If the resource is False, the call will change the audio output sample rate to match the current audio compression scheme. InPerson*audioInputGain (Audio input gain) This resource boosts the level of the audio from the microphone. The most common reason to change this because other conference participants have trouble hearing you even with your audio input level set to its maximum value. It is a integer value; default is 2. Valid range is 1 to 8. InPerson*audioSuppressSilence (Audio silence suppression) By default, InPerson detects when you're not talking to avoid sending unnecessary audio packets, thus saving network bandwidth. The silence detection algorithm may not work well in noisy environments and depends on the audio input level set by apanel(1). Set to false to disable. InPerson*fontNumber (Whiteboard default font) The whiteboard has four font choices, selectable via a menu. This resource specifies the default choice. Range: 0 to 3, with 0 as the default. InPerson*drawingLineWidth (Whiteboard default line width) Specifies the default line width for the whiteboard. Range: 0 to 3, with 2 as the default. InPerson*showDrawer (Display who-drew-what on the whiteboard) Enables whether or not the whiteboard displays the name of the person who drew the object pointed to by the mouse. Values: "on" (default) or "off". InPerson*imageDirectory (Default location for images) This resource specifies the initial directory shown by the file browser when importing an image. Default is /usr/share/data/images. InPerson*textFileDirectory (Default location for text files) This resource specifies the initial directory shown by the file browser when importing a text file. Default is your home directory. InPerson*modelFileDirectory (Default location for 3D models) This resource specifies the initial directory shown by the file browser when importing a model. Default is /usr/share/data/models. InPerson*networkMTU (Conference network packet size) Lets you specify the underlying network packet size. If you have a network that is composed entirely of FDDI rings, set this value to the FDDI MTU of 4352 (see the output of /usr/etc/netstat -i for appropriate MTU values). See the comments in the app-defaults file for more details. InPerson*multicastTTL (Conference network range) This resource affects how how widely distributed the multicast packets will be through the network. It is specified in hops; maximum number of IP multicast routers between any two participants in a conference. Default value is 10. Range is 1 (meaning local net only) to 63. InPerson*networkPortMin/Max (Conference network port range) If you want to use InPerson through a network packet filter/firewall, these two resources let you specify the range of ports used for audio and video UDP packets and for whiteboard TCP packets. InPerson RPC packets use the TCP port that is defined in the file /etc/services for the service named "sgi_iphone". If that service is not defined, InPerson RPC packets use TCP port 32769. Make sure the port is not in the range used by networkPortMin and networkPortMax. Faces Database inperson displays static face images of users in several circumstances. When an incoming call is ringing, the a face image is displayed alternately with the phone icon to indicate who is calling. During a call, a static face image is displayed for users without video hardware. This static face image is in the same format and location(s) as used by clogin(1). If inperson cannot find a face image for a specific user, it uses the face image for "inperson", if it exists. To add yourself to the faces database, run capture(1) on a workstation equipped with video. Pose in front of the camera, and use the image snapshot feature to create a quarter-sized static image. Then copy that file to one of the faces locations as specified by clogin(1). NOTES The audio input sampling rate is automatically set to the sampling rate used by the audio compression scheme. The default scheme uses a 16kHz rate. The behavior for the audio output sampling rate depends on the audioAutoRateConversion resource described above. inperson's on-line help requires the InPerson User's Guide and the Setup & Administration Guide to be installed. FILES /usr/sbin/inperson /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/InPerson $HOME/.desktop-`hostname`/InPerson $HOME/.InPerson.aliases BUGS Please see the InPerson release notes for known bugs and workarounds. If the original sender of a file on the shelf leaves the conference and another participant sends that file on to a newly joined participant, the newly joined participant will only be able to access the file if it is available via NFS. The workaround is for the user wishing to send the file, to drag the file to a local directory view then drop the new local copy on the shelf.