While NetMeeting (or the Linux NetMeeting app -- yes I know, you want Windows) may be an unwieldy monster, a lot of time went into making that unwieldy monster. Even if you only have to do 1/10th of that work, it's still a ton of work.

Netmeeting uses the H232 protocol, AFAIK, which is beyond horrible, for it needs about a million ports opened, which is a problem for firewalls. The app itself may have nice features, the ports needed is just unworkable for a lot of places. Power to the OP to come up with something better.

I will say that UDP is probably a bad choice. What you want is a TCP/IP system that has some sort of quality-of-service feature (possibly using UDP for timing? who knows), as UDP has a small packet size and (worst of all) ordering is not guaranteed. For important packets, especially ones that set up states for your program, you can't have them being lost either.

I beg to differ on this point, for I believe UDP is way better suited for transmission of images, than TCP. The initial connection should probably made through TCP, I agree, but afterwards (the sending of image data) is better suited with UDP. With TCP, all packets will arrive sooner or later, resulting in waiting on the receiving end for TCP to put the packets back in order. With UDP you might get a blur/glitch, but at least the "stream" continues. I believe this is preferable over the waiting time, especially since speed was the "itch" that made the OP consider writing his own app.

But then again, AFAIK, HTTP utilizes TCP only :( Correct me if I'm wrong on this, please :)

--
b10m

In reply to Re: Designing a webcam video streaming client-server application in Windows by b10m
in thread Designing a webcam video streaming client-server application in Windows by gaggio

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.