PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing • Hacker News Board

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#51

Post by zapu » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

Scaevolus wrote: post #36

frk1206 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a co-founder/dev at PowWow. VoiceChat is going to be in the next major release. We already have system audio being ogg/vorbis'ed to you so its not a question of expertise but simply time allocation. I completely agree that whenever we have PowWow'ed, we would have a active skype session since that's much easier than chat. That's also what a alpha release is supposed to be - to gather your inputs! So if everyone a…

Have a look at Opus, another free audio codec that provides lower latency (~22ms) and better quality than Vorbis. It also scales down to low-bitrate speech, but I doubt you need that for your application.

Do you have experience in using Opus for something else than speech? I'm currently in a project that deals with audio streaming and I've been exploring my options. Would love to hear about your thoughts!

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#52

Post by kstenson » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 2:45 PM UTC

Are you guys aware of powwownow? it's has voice/video conferencing. Although not exactly like your product, it does share some similarities.

http://www.powwownow.co.uk/

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#53

Post by the1 » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 3:31 PM UTC

no linux, android, ipad support

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#54

Post by elsif1 » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 3:45 PM UTC

davidcollantes wrote: post #43

Interesting on how no replies have been received on how it works. Mind it, I have not installed it, but, is there a server(s) to connect to, is it peer-to-peer? Care to provide more details? Thanks!

It is peer to peer when possible (>90% of the time). Otherwise it is relayed.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#55

Post by semiquaver » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

rockyj wrote: post #2

Looks nice! I wish it gives support for Linux as well. Good screen sharing tools for Linux are virtually non-existent (and I am often ridiculed for it).

Google hangout's built-in screen sharing actually works perfectly for me. (Ubuntu 12.10)

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#56

Post by Wump » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 4:43 PM UTC

the1 wrote: post #53

no linux, android, ipad support

Mobile support is on the horizon, though Windows is coming first.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#57

Post by Wump » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 4:51 PM UTC

shravan wrote: post #11

This is super slick. Just played around with it with a friend and there's almost no lag. My CPU spun up quite a bit but nevertheless color me impressed. I'm curious how this is implemented though?

The networking is P2P (most of the time). The screen sharing is VP8 video compression. Presence is XMPP. The multiple mice, separate dock icon, and a lot of other little things are the result of a lot of hacking :)

We're going to be working on making the encoding more CPU efficient. (btw if anyone has any expertise in real-time video codecs we'd love to talk to you)

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#58

Post by Wump » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 4:59 PM UTC

nXqd wrote: post #49

We cannot work parallel with this screen sharing right ? So it just looks juicy with cursor look like google docs :D

That's correct, two people can't be doing 2 different things at the same time (i.e., there is one keyboard). However you do have 2 mouse pointers and you can move/point/click with them independently. We found that in practice we actually preferred this because it's valuable to know that everyone is looking at the same thing at the same time.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#59

Post by protomyth » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 5:03 PM UTC

You know, you probably could have chosen a better name. If for nothing else you are competing on searches with all of the actual Pow Wow websites that tribes and dancers have set up to catalog their events.

Re: PowWow - Collaborative Screen Sharing

#60

Post by mosfet9 » Sat, Dec 15, 2012, 5:48 PM UTC

Looks great! The two-cursor feature would also be extremely useful when two mice are connected to one computer. We do pair programming at work and I could see a tool that allows two people sitting at one machine to each have their own cursor totally transforming the way we work. Is this a feature you plan on developing?