Does Video Conferencing use multicast?

[mparekh]

We want to enable vide conferencing between multiple remote sites, however, our providers backbone does not support multicast traffic.

The question I have is if I have 2 users in Boston, 2 in NYC and 2 in SF for video conferencing, is the traffic output from a MCU a multicast or unicast to the remote sites?

This is with the MCU at the NYC location.

[jrobrts]

If you are referring to the IPVC product family then the answer is that it currently only support unicast transmissions. If you conference is set to be 384K then each user would get that back to them as a unicast transmission back from the MCU that matched that bitrate.

[jollywc]

H.323 uses unicast traffic. Some vtc endpoints are also capavle of generation a mutlicats video stream, but that is not a part of the H.323 feature set.

[jollywc]

H.323 uses unicast traffic. Some vtc endpoints are also capavle of generation a mutlicats video stream, but that is not a part of the H.323 feature set. Multicast is not supported on the public internet, and very few if any providers are going to allow it on their backbone.