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	Conferral

Video Conferencing

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N/A

While Conferral does not offer any traditional video conferencing abilities, it is among the very few conferencing and presentation tools to offer an integrated video clip streaming service which allows video footage to be delivered in real-time to your meeting attendees directly from your own PC.

To stream a video clip to one or more Conferral attendees the host/presenter needs only to click on the Conferral system tray icon and select the Show Video function.

The same Show Video functionality can be called from the Conferral Control Center by selecting Video Library and then launching one of the available, previously uploaded videos or from the Conferral Conference Control floating window by selecting Show Video.

Video clips are played both on the presenter screen as well as on the attendees through the Conferral Media Player, a fixed-size window that integrates the basic playback, pause and stop buttons as well as an option to blow the window to full screen mode.

Video clips can also be served "on-demand", meaning that they can be placed in the Video Library for viewing on-demand by your invitees. As long as your PC is on and connected to the Internet, anyone to whom you have provided the unique Conferral URL to view the video can connect and stream it live from the presenter PC. The unique Conferral URL (web address) is created ad-hoc for you each time you publish a video clip through Conferral.

When uploading a new video clip to the Conferral Video Library the user is prompted for selecting the best delivery mode, video size and bandwidth available. The video can be kept at the original resolution or rezied to a different screen resolution. Video clips can also be played back in full-screen mode by utilizing the dedicated function placed on the top right corner of the Conferral Media Player.

As soon as the options are selected the video is converted locally, on the PC of the presenter into a Windows Media Video streaming video file. The source video is encoded in Windows Media Format using the bit rate and display size selections chosen on the wizard screen (when you select "Better Quality" Conferral uses the Windows Media 9 codec, while when selecting "More Compatible" Conferral utilizes the Windows Media 7 codec).

The user can also set Conferral not to convert the video clip by selecting the option "Don't Process Video". This option is available only if the video has a bitrate of less than 500 kbps.

The show video option also allows you to add audio-only files to the library.

Video clips can also be previewed after conversion by the presenter before other attendees are invited to view it.

Cons:

The significant amount of bandwidth required for delivering video online, limits the number of effective attendees that can simultaneously view video content to just a few on a broadband connection. About one to three on a typical ADSL or cable line and up to five or more on a local area network.