AVChat Software Product Blog

There are two ways to open the AVChat Video Chat Component in a pop up in Joomla!:

1. Using Joomla!’s default method:
   • Log in the administrator area of Joomla!.
   • In the Menus area edit the link to AVChat 3.
   • Set the On Click, Open in option to  New Window without Browser Navigation (screenshot below)
   • Click Save.

   

   That’s it! Clicking the link in the menu will now open the video chat in a pop up. Using this method however you will not have control over the pop up dimensions

2. A way that allows you to control the size of the pop up:
   • For this you’ll need to login to your website with an FTP client (FileZilla is our favourite) and go to /components/com_avchat3/
   • Open avchat3.php for editing.
   • Replace the object & embed html tags (everything from <object… to </object>) with this html code:
     <a href=”javascript:void(0);” onclick=”window.open(’/components/com_avchat3/index.swf’, ‘AVChat’, ‘menubar=0, resizable =0, width=900, height=650′);”>Launch AVChat Video Chat</a>

   • Save the file and make sure you upload it back to the web server.

   You can change the size of the pop up by editing the width and height properties in the code above.

We used to solve all AVChat issues by email, and it was wrong because all the info we’ve shared by email is now locked in those private email discussions, and believe me there’s a lot of useful info in those emails!

That’s why we’ve now launched a proper, public, forum : http://avchat.net/forum/,  to make all that „problem solving info” available to everyone! The entire AVChat team will be answering questions in there so expect proper deep technical documented answers.

There are special areas for all our products including AVChat, the HD  video recorder and the audio recorder.

The private and personal support by email is still available to our customers, the forum is just an addition!

New features:

• Better audio quality (Speex codec now used by default).
• Users become idle (by default after 1 minute of no activity in the chat, this value can be changed from avc_settings.xxx):
• You can now control the volume for each audio/video stream in particular and mute or go fullscreen with one click:
• You can now change the color of the text chat area background (edit style.css, white by default).
• If the user denies access to his webcam/mic the [Start My Webcam] button will show up again.
• You can now drag windows by clicking anywhere in them (not just on the title).
• Better ghost users detection (the users list attempts not to show the ghost users, fix for the IE issue on the standalone version)
• vBulletin 4 compatibility

Bugs solved:

• Some issues with writing Unicode characters in the text chat logs
• Issue with UI being scrambled sometimes when streaming was turned off completely
• Issue with user item side menu sometimes disappearing when the user being clicked was in the lower part of the users list.
• Issue with the external users/rooms list not being updated and not having special characters escaped
• Absolute number of users in external file (instead of teh sum of users in all rooms)
• When sorting by cams/mics the groups that form are now sorted by username!

How to get the new AVChat 3 build:

• download the software again from your client area

How to update your installation:

• in the usual way: overwrite ALL the old files (including the en.xml language file and the media server files) and restart the media server!
• if the above fails make a clean clean  install!

When AVChat 3 is opened in a pop up window you can use the [Leave Chat] button to close the pop up window:

1. edit avc_settings.php or avc_settings.asp
2. set $avconfig['disconnectButtonEnabled']=1;
3. set $avconfig['disconnectButtonLink'] = ‘javascript:window.close();‘;

By default clicking [Leave Chat] takes you to a new web page instead of closing the window!

On the publisher side:

Problem: low frame rate

Solution(s):

1. Increase the light in the room, natural light works best.
2. Get a better web cam, good web cams capture a lot of frames with little light in the room.
3. Lower the picture resolution requested by AVChat 3, some web cams just can’t capture 30fps at 400×300.
4. Increase the movement in the shot, if there’s no movement Flash Player will not capture many frames/second because there’s no movement.

Problem: video stream does not use entire allocated bandwidth

Solution(s):

1. Increase the light in the room, natural light works best. More light helps the web cam capture more details!
2. Get a better web cam, good web cams capture a lot of detail with little light in the room. DV cams for example capture huge ammounts of data compared to normal web cams.
3. Check your connection to the media server. When you’re publishing video you’re  uploading data to the media server. Even tough you might have a 20Mbits/s Internet connection, that’s most probably your download rate, your actual upload rate could be much less. If you’ve configured the video chat to use as much as 768kbits/s per stream, this ammount of video data will not fit in real time trough your 350kbits/s upload pipe!

Problem: dark image or noisy image

Solution(s):

1. Increase the light in the room, natural light works best.
2. Get a better webcam.

Problem: no image at all or blank image

Solution(s):

1. Make sure your web cam is not already used by another app
2. Make sure the proper web cam is used by Flash Player (Right click -> Settings -> Web Cam tab -> Select the web cam you want to use from the drop down list)

The May Build of AVChat 3 (due next week) will have support for the Speex audio codec introduced in Flash Player 10. This will mean better audio quality,lower latency and less bandwidth usage than before!

This is one of the reasons we’ve switched to Flash Player 10 for AVChat 3 starting with the April Build, other changes will include separate volume control for each web cam and proper behaviour when the users denies access to his web cam and mic.

The old codec we’ve been using so far in AVChat 3, the NellyMoser Asao codec, was introduced in Flash Player 6 and was licensed by Adobe from NellyMoser Inc. . Because NellyMoser Inc. had the full rights to the audio codec this made it hard and expensive for developers to convert files encoded with NellyMoser to AAC or MP3. This was one of the main complains against NellyMoser Asao.

The Speex codec, introduced in FP10, is optimized for voice and provides better audio quality using less bandwdith. It is also open souce so you can decode it and convert it to mp3 or aac (ffmpeg already decodes Speex) without needing any licenses. It also provides more levels (11) of quality as opposed to NellyMoserAsao (only 5).

In this table comparing compression rates for Nelly Moser Asao and Speex in Flash Player you can see that Speex at its highest setting needs half the bandwidth NellyMoser Asao uses at its highest setting:

We will update our article covering changing the audio quality in AVChat 3 in time for the release next week, however, no changes will be needed as the new build will default to using the new Speex codec for audio. Until next week you can test the new audio quality in our online demo of AVChat 3.

Overview

In order to show on your website who is logged in the video chat, AVChat 3 generates 2 external files in the folder where it is installed:

• users__definst_.txt -> a text file containing the number of unique users connected to the video chat
• users__definst_.xml -> an xml file containing the list of rooms and users in each room

You will see these files ONLY AFTER THE FIRST USER (NOT ADMIN) LOGS IN THE VIDEO CHAT!

You can use these 2 files to show on your website how many clients are logged in, the room structure or which clients are logged in!

How to actually code/do that is outside the scope of this article but anyone with minumum php or .net experience  should be able to parse the xml/text file and post the contents on the website.

How it works

In detail:

1. user joins the video chat via index.swf, the path to the writeuserslist.php is automatically detected
2. user joins a room, the media server sends the new  rooms/users structure to writeuserslist.php via POST (using the path detected at step 1)
3. writeuserslist.php receives the new info via POST and creates the 2 files on the web server

The media server automatically detects the path to writeuserslist.php WHEN THE FIRST USER (NOT ADMIN) LOGS IN THE VIDEO CHAT.

One some of our integration kits admin.swf and writeuserslist.php are placed in separate folders, that’s why admins logging in do not trigger an attempt to detect the path to writeuserslist.php!

Admins and users are properly listed in the external .xml file as long as at least a user has logged in in the past so that the media server knows where writeuserslist.php is located!

You can also set the path manually (via the settings.asc/avchat3.properties files on the media server) and you should when:

• you’re using writeuserslist.asp (or any other scripting language) instead of writeuserslist.php
• you’ve moved writeuserslist.php to a separate folder
• you have troubles with the external users list not being generated

Troubleshooting

If the 2 files refuse to appear do these tasks in this order:

1. Log in the video chat trough the user interface (not the admin interface/area)
2. Make sure the folder containing writeuserslist.php is chmoded to 777 so that writeuserslist.php can write/crate new files
3. Make sure calls to the new info is POST-ed from the media server to the web server (check Apache logs)
4. Make sure the folder where writeuserslist.php is located is not password protected!
5. Hard code the path to writeuserslist.php  in settings.asc ( on FMIS ) or in avchat3.properties ( on Wowza/Red5 ) and restart the media server
6. contact support: http://avchat.net/support/request-support/

Turning the feature off

On FMIS  edit applications/avchat30/settings asc, set application.writeUsersLists=false and restart FMIS!

On Red5 edit webapps/avchat30/avchat3.properties, set writeUsersLists=false and restart Red5!

On Wowza edit conf/avchat30/avchat3.properties, set writeUsersLists=false and restart Wowza!

This will turn off the feature and stop the media server from making POST calls to the web server!

AVChat 3 supports emote icons and you can add your own emote icons if you want to!

By default AVChat 3 uses the emote icons in the emoticons\standardPack folder. The list of available emote icons in this pack is contained in emoticons\standardPack\emoticons.xml . You can edit this file to add and remove emote icons.

To add an emote icon to the standard pack:

1. Put the emote icon file (swf, jpg, png, gif) in the emoticons\standardPack folder.
   
2. Edit emoticons\standardPack\emoticons.xml and add a new e element before the final </emoticons> tag:
   <e text=”:newemoteicon:” url=”emoticons/standardPack/newemoteicon.swf”></e>
3. Upload the new emote icon file and the changed emoteicons.xml file to your web site.
   

In the <e text=”:newemoteicon:” url=”emoticons/standardPack/newemoteicon.swf”></e> XML code:

• :newemoteicon: is the text that will be replaced in the text chat with the new emote icon
• emoticons/standardPack/newemoteicon.swf is the path to the emote icon

Some things you should know:

• AVChat 3 only supports 14×14px .swf, .jpg, .png or .gif files as emote icons.
• Emote icons larger or smaller than 14×14 will not display properly!
• Animated GIF’s are not supported (Flash Player limitation).
• You can also make your own pack with its own emoteicons.xml list file. The path to the emoteicons.xml file used by AVChat 3 can be changed from avc_settings.xxx via the emoticonsurl variable.

Ghost users are a known issue with all media servers.

What is a ghost user?

A ghost user is a user who’s disconnection from the media server has not been detected by the media server, thus the media server thinks he is still connected.

In a chat you will know there are ghost users when you see 2-3 persons in the users list having the same user name or persons staying for unusual lenghts of time in the chat without activity.

What causes ghost users?

They happen when a user suddenly disconnects from the Internet while connected to a media server (for example by suddenly disconnecting your Ethernet cable or loosing WiFi signal) but in other occasions too like when the user is over a slow connection (mobile connections) or behind some weird combination of network hardware + server software. IE and the way it handles Flash content might also produce ghost users.

How is AVChat 3 dealing with ghost users?

1. every 3 seconds the client  (swf file) sends a ping to the media server (this value can not be changed)
2. every 10 seconds the media server (Red5/Wowza/FMIS) check if all clients have sent a ping within the last 10 seconds (already 3 pings should have been sent by every client) and disconnects everyone who has not.

This means that no ghost user will ever stay in the chat for more than 20 seconds.

Starting with build 741 (April) you can contol the above mechanism by changing the value of the checkForGhostConnectionsEveryXSeconds and ghostUsersAreIdleForYSeconds variables in settings.asc (FMIS) or avchat3.properties (Red5 and Wowza). If your users seem to get disconnected for no apparent reason increase the value of ghostUsersAreIdleForYSeconds to for example 20 seconds. Both variables are set by default to 10 seconds.

The IE exception

In some cases when closing a tab in IE, IE will not remove the client side swf (index.swf) from the memory, thus the ping calls will be made  even tough the user has closed the tab containing the chat.  Such ghost users can only be removed by :

• the user closing all IE tabs and windows
• an admin kicking him out of the chat

We are working on a  fix for this exception.

Our new AVChat 3 Application for IP.Board 3 provides full integration with an IP.Board 3 Forum.

Forum Members will be able to:

• Login into the chat with their username and gender
• Access user profiles directly from the chat
• Link their profile image into the chat
• Share files with other members in chat rooms
• Watch YouTube movies into the chat rooms

Admins will be able to:

• Configure permissions foreach user group
• Kick/ Ban users
• Assign admin rights to other user groups and configure admin permissions.

Other features:

• The application can be installed as any other IP.Board 3 Application.
• The Main Menu link is automatically generated.

The price for the AVChat3 Application for IP.Board 3 is $49 and it’s available when you buy AVChat3.

To buy it go to the purchase page and select one of the  AVChat 3 licenses + the IP.Board 3 Application.

For more details, please visit the AVChat3 Application for IP.Board 3 page.