Extending Ekiga to Desktop Sharing

Abstract

Desktop Video Conferencing (DVC) is now a widely used technology in the Internet Community. However, this requirement cannot be fulfilled effectively due to lack of open source software. The existing software are either hardware specific or proprietary. Only a few open source software such as Ekiga, are capable of video conferencing. ‘Ekiga’ is an open source VoIP video conferencing application which supports both SIP and H.323 protocols. However, non of them are capable of DVC. This project attempts to extend the features of Ekiga to enable desktop sharing which is a key feature of DVC. Then Ekiga become a fully-fledge desktop video conferencing tool. We introduce a new feature to Ekiga that enables desktop sharing in the context of video conferencing. The desktop that is captured at ‘X11’ and streamed is then merged with the available video stream (i.e video stream which is coming from a camera). There are many application which can share a portion of a desktop or whole desktop at once to the recipient, however there are no such applications to share a specific application to the recipient. This is the significant feature of this project. The core idea of this project is to share a specific application GUI to the end user. Hence end user can view both camera video and the desktop video on the same screen. The proportion of the PIPs (Picture in Picture) can be adjusted by the streamer. Most of the all Unix-like operating systems use X11 as the base of GUI of the operating system, however Windowsr uses DirectX. X11 is the framework which integrate all the input and output devices as well. However window manager and desktop environment are based on X window System. In x xi this project we propose a mechanism to capture full desktop or a specific application GUI based on the features and functionalities of the X11. The captured image of the desktop is taken into the Ekiga by a network program. This network program defines a protocol. The protocol that is proposed in this project facilitates communication between X11, through XWD, and Ekiga according to a specified set of parameters such as frame size, frame capturing rate and subsampling filter parameters. These parameter values are predefined according to the user requirement. The image captured according to the parameter mentioned above will be transformed into YUV data format in order to replace Ekiga frame buffer. Additionally, this enables the user to share the desktop of a remote machine through a local machine. Experimental results show that the proposed design is effective and functioning according to the requirements. Sharing a specific application’s GUI works perfectly with the system. This can be extensible for various kinds of application such as e-Learning systems. We plan to extend this as an open source application since it is based on an open source product and it helps to facilitate the development in a collaborative manner.