Running Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional

Exchange of video information works much the same way as exchange of sound. You can do this with one other party at a time, and you must be communicating via TCP/IP.

As with sound, video communication can be unidirectional or bidirectional. Video received appears in the main NetMeeting window, as shown in Figure 21-7.

Figure 21-7. The video being received is the larger picture. The video being sent is the small picture in the lower right corner of the larger picture.

While you're sending video, you can monitor what's going out by choosing My Video from the View menu. This opens the My Video window where you can see the video you are sending. If you don't need a picture as big as the My Video window, click the Picture-In-Picture button to see a smaller version of the outgoing video in the lower right corner of the incoming video picture.

Figure 21-8 shows the Video tab of the Options dialog box (choose Options from the Tools menu) with default settings. By default, NetMeeting receives video automatically at the start of a call if the party on the other end of the connection has a camera. By default, video is sent automatically at the start of a call if your computer has a camera.

Because video transmission uses a lot of bandwidth and can degrade the performance of some of NetMeeting's other features (particularly shared programs), sometimes you might want to clear either or both of the top two check boxes shown in Figure 21-8. You can also turn off video transmission in either direction after it has begun by clicking the Stop Video button in the NetMeeting main window.

The Send Image Size and Video Quality sections of the dialog box allow you to balance quality and performance. NetMeeting sets the size to medium and the quality to middle-of-the-road by default. If you're working with a high-bandwidth connection (for example, if you're connecting with another user on your local area network, or if your network is connected to the Internet through a high-speed T1 connection), you might want to move up to a larger image size and better quality.

Figure 21-8. By default, NetMeeting automatically uses video whenever possible at the start of a call.

If you're using a camera attached to a video-capture card and you have more than one such card, the list at the bottom of the dialog box lets you specify the device you want to use.

TIP