The Network Video Terminal

Currently, a variety of the MBONE video tools provide video conferencing capabilities on different platforms and with a variety of compression algorithms. However, most of these tools lack the ability to interact with other media agents that might be used during a conferencing session. Such interaction is required, for example, for achieving lip synchronisation between audio and video streams or for quality of service control. In this paper, we present a new video tool, NEVIT. This tool provides the basic capabilities needed for video conferencing services such as video capturing, compression and decompression engines and multicasting and ATM network interfaces. To ease the interaction with other media agents, NEVIT incorporates a message handling facility to interact over a local conference bus with other media agents, a floor controller or the conference controller. Currently, we are working on adding lip synchronisation and quality-ofservice control using this conference bus.