Multimedia remote collaboration system

Most modern science advances are done through collaboration of groups from multiple academic and research institutions. This paper explores some techniques used at Carnegie Mellon University to facilitate communication between groups through multimedia. The result consists in a system that can do streaming and recording of high quality audio/video using two high definition pan/tilt/zoom cameras, videoconferencing, web control and scheduling of events, in-room touchscreen control of the equipment, and surveillance of the conference room, everything with minimum human intervention. The main purpose of this research was to go beyond expensive commercial solutions which have important limitations, and to build as much as possible based on open source software and off-the-shelf hardware. A modular software was developed to link together the common hardware components with a commercial canned solution offered by the multimedia vendors. The system presented here were tested for about two years in a production environment and proved to be stable and reliable.