MeBeam (not the old Sametime DataBeam) offers free 8-way video conferencing
Tags :MeBeam Sametime
I ran across this site and pinged Carl to jump in and see what we could make of it. There is the good and the bad. No the bad is not this following screenshot.
So we were being silly to play around with the features. Headsets on backwards and others. When you use the chat room it takes a snapshot of just how you are when you click send. So the pictures are resized too small for you to see, but Carl and missing pants is bad all around.
Good
Free video conferencing is good no matter how you slice it if it works well. This one seemed to do just fine. Now, we didn't get 8 people in the room, but that is next on the list. You had the choice between hands free audio and push-to-talk type. Both seemed to function fine.
Creating a room for the conference did not even require registration at this time. Simply name a room and click invite and it copied the link to the clipboard. It then uses the Flash connection for your video and audio. No problem, worked right away for both of us. No fuss, no mess, no firewall issues, no downloads. The chat was, well chat.
Bad
It seemed there was a way to record but I couldn't find the button. Chat worked fine, but needs a bit more ability. Attaching or sending a file would be nice so everyone could talk. It still is not a 1.0 release so I imagine more is coming. I am curious about the bandwidth as this grows, but let's see how it plays out.
So overall, did I say it was free with no firewall issue in the tests? No tunneling and numerous ports for AV like I got asked yesterday for Sametime
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On Friday, September 21st, 2007 by Chris Miller
