Okies what is a 'Tzone-a-saurus'?
Its the best way to describe a 'skype machine' basically when you call someone on skype you connect one to one at that level you can (and the same with other VOIP providers too) have a video call or at least very good audio quality. What happens and its more obvious recently with MS taking them over, is the moment you bypass 4 people the servers know you may well be commercial or at least should be buying corporate packages. This is all very well for Alan sugar, but support groups can have a lot of people but are not corporate just friends wanting fun and chat.
So whats the answer?
Well a long time ago Leo laport and Collen over at twit.TV create 4 identical skype pcs just doing that and nothing else. they have a small screen each.
http://wiki.twit.tv/w/images/thumb/Firs ... 0-1524.jpghttp://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/EquipmentThis man does this for a living and has a tv show of course but we can get very close in some aspects based around a lot of equipment i already have from my music days - the mixer for example.
They have either a KVM switch box 1234 or you can use synergy as mentioned above to control them - synergy can be hit and miss though. then you connect all the pcs audio from the speakers to a line in on a mixer so four channels and then you send back the audi to each pc via the aux sends minus their own voce so they can hear everyother noise on the mixer apart from themselves - this prevents echo. But it means yuou need a mixer with a min of 4 aux sends, Then you add a telephone hybrid machine to that, so you can also bring in a telephone caller (who may not have skype) into the discussion, this also needs an aux send although most of these machines do it automatically still its best to stick with aux sends and finally one more aux send maybe use for a second telephone line - a ISDN or even a sound cart where you can play in audio to the show sounds music whatever although thats a spare send - the mixer has 6 aux send.
So in theory when the mixer comes out of mothballs this will all work =P then there is recording.
To record the show we need a firewire pc with adobe audition that can detect all the channels individually
in other words all 6 channels on the mixer (and more) can be recorded individually live, when the show is over i can then look at each person or groups (as in each pc) that may have audio problems and just fix that one perosn or group of 4 the rest will remain unaffected then when i am happy I can 'mix down' the lot into a single stereo file. and take it from there for editing.
this is often not necessary but this can be handy for a couple of reasons. If a person in the call has a cruddy mic or they want their voice disguised this is possible as they can come in on their own pc and we could fiddle and alter it for the podcast at least without changing the rest of the call, maybe even on the fly - but it always attracts more attention than speaking normally so I dont see the point really
P
finally video. the problem with having 4 pcs is the group can only see the other callers in their group or conference. But they can hear perhaps 10 other people
now this is something that has been considered and thought about.
Each pc has its own svideo in and svideo out - I basically send one s video (or composite) signal into a splitter amplifier box, that has four coming out each of those goes to the video in on the skype machines then one camera will send video to each caller if they make a video call one to one i can aim the camera at the screens and you can see what is happening. Now f there is more than one person in the call you cannt use video (unless you by skype beta) so I can stream that video like we do now with the flashing logo but an image of the rooms and callers - too small to id people (you can use a different and more desgusied photo anyway. and then watch the stream with the audio turned down to see the video of the room.
cool eh?
![[yesss]](./images/smilies/yes.gif "yesss")
anyways you will be added to the call starting next sunday (the 17) weather permitting
P and we will test this all out. There is still a lot of tweaking to do yet and next week Susie and I will be configuring it all in skype.
however if thi works out we could in effect have a tv show (dont worry we wont for a good while LOL) WITH up to 6 callers (if i unplug the telephone which wont be used much anyway) but usually 3 or 4.
But what this is actually for is to allow our group to have up to 16 people in it with reasonable audio.
9 with very good audio
IM
in the picture 
