Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
Sixteen person versions

This link to Koowy (previously mebeam and before that WigiWigi) allows sixteen people to join in a video call. Select your own unique room name which will be hard for outsiders to guess and connect; when the window has refreshed with your room ready for calls, send the url which will be something like http://www.mebeam.com/your-room-name to friends by instant messenger (Skype or similar) which they click to join your call.

You all need to click "Allow" in the Adobe Flash Player Settings window and probably need to click the Mic setting to enable audio which will appear at the top left of the your video window when you move your mouse over it. Each person needs a webcam or the program will be disabled for them. It also disables after a short time if no movement is detected.

Type messages in the bottom box and Enter and they will appear with your avatar in the middle box.

Don't use an obvious room name like room-1 as rooms with names like this are public rooms sometimes infested with undesirable people doing distasteful things; usually you will see people already in these rooms and they are used like a public bar or club.

Unfortunately the version below has been superseded and the current version is as linked above.

Eighteen person version. (It works here in IE7, Opera, Safari for Windows and in Firefox.)



Note: the colors have gone wrong because the programmer is changing things.

Video conference rooms for eighteen people. This room is automatically preset to $ozwickham. Setting a preset enables callers to have their own room for regular use with contacts and friends and if desired the series of calls can be recorded for later playback. It will not work on a computer unless Flash software is already installed. This program is in early development and sometimes off-line. It needs a fast broadband connection with low latency.

If you wish to set up your own preset room name, look at the source code for this page and copy the object tag code from <object type= to </object> into your own web page code. Change $ozwickham to your own room name (minimum four characters, maximum sixteen, no spaces), with a $ prefix if you want the video calls to be recorded.

A playback of a call can be seen by using the url http://www.mebeam.com/playroom.php? and adding your room name with the $ prefix immediately after the ?. You need a connection with high speed/bandwidth and low latency or the video streams will not be synchronised. The playback facility is often offline as it is still in development and is not integrated in the main program yet.

If you talk by yourself you can leave a message for someone to view later. This program is still experimental and since I don't expect many messages I may not check it every day.